


Two Can Play At That Game

by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat)



Series: Two Can Play At That Game [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Academia, Alternate Season/Series 10, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Humor, Angst and Romance, Awkward Romance, Bittersweet Ending, Chameleon Arch (Doctor Who), Doctor Who Series 12 Spoilers, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Episode AU: s12e10 The Timeless Children, F/M, Gen, Memories, Memory Alteration, New Companions (Doctor Who), Other, Please Keep Your Arms And Legs Inside The Emotional Rollercoaster At All Times, Romantic Comedy, Season/Series 10, Season/Series 10 Spoilers, Season/Series 12, Slow Burn, Some Romantic Fluff, Spoilers for Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, St. Luke's University, Timeline What Timeline, these two nerds I swear to god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:54:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 52,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23455867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiLarpItsCat/pseuds/HiNerdsItsCat
Summary: The offer was accepted and the arrangement was made: to save her friends from the Cybermen, the Thirteenth Doctor agreed to ten trips with the Master in his TARDIS—but before they could depart, the Doctor threw in an additional complication:“If you’re hearing this, it means that you just realised you couldn’t open the locket. You shouldn’t leave things like Chameleon Arches lying about like that, you know. People can get up to all sorts of mischief if left alone with one. So here’s my end of the deal: the locket will open after ten trips in the TARDIS. Until then, you’re stuck with your new human companion, Jenny Smith. I’ll still be travelling with you… I just won’t have to be there for it.”—which is when the Master added in a complication of his own:“If you want to run from your problems and hide inside a little human costume… fine. Two can play at that game.”Meanwhile in Bristol, the Twelfth Doctor’s decades-long routine of eccentric lecturing and vault guarding is about to be upended by the two most disruptive students St. Luke’s University has ever had: the perpetually bickering Jenny Smith and Harry Jones.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), The Master (Dhawan) & Missy, Thirteenth Doctor & Missy, Thirteenth Doctor & Twelfth Doctor, Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), Twelfth Doctor & The Master (Dhawan), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Series: Two Can Play At That Game [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1733089
Comments: 366
Kudos: 393





	1. The Arrangement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Series 12, Episode 10: “The Timeless Children”

The Doctor was so distracted by the remains of the Citadel that she didn’t even bother to look at the floor.

_This is almost too easy._

With a grin, the Master triggered the paralysis field. 

Now he had everything under control: the Cybermen were on their way, the Doctor was locked in place, and he had all the knowledge he needed to break her hearts and her spirit.

And the gloating… oh, the gloating felt _so good._

As expected, she attempted to reason with him: “Whatever you want with me, fine… but save my friends. Don’t let the Cybermen take them. If the history between us means anything to you—”

“I do believe you’re appealing to my better nature,” he said with a smirk. “But we both know—”

“You win.” Her voice was so quiet as to be nearly inaudible.

He almost laughed. “Beg your pardon?”

“You win,” the Doctor repeated through clenched teeth.

Oh, that was a lovely thing to hear… so why not hear it a few more times? “Can’t quite hear you, love.”

“Do you want me to kneel again? Call you by your name over and over? Cry? Beg? Fine!” Her eyes were more desperate than he expected. “You remember what happened to Bill on the Mondasian ship, don’t you? I can’t bear to have that happen again, not to people who trusted me.” 

She took a shaky breath— _was_ she actually about to start crying? This was becoming so pathetic as to border on uncomfortable.

“And I know that it just makes you want to hurt them even more, knowing that I care about them,” the Doctor continued, “but please. You know me. You know what I’m like when I don’t think I have anything left to lose, you know what I’m like when I still have a little glimmer of hope remaining, and you know which version of me is easier to hurt. I’m not trying to appeal to your better nature… because we both know you don’t have one.”

He had a plan, a beautiful plan… but this was unexpected in a way that he was finding difficult to resist. 

What would he do, if he could get her to do anything?

It was a gamble, one that he should ignore. He should just let her friends die, show her the truth in the Matrix, and then cause absolute mayhem with the Cybermen, exactly as he planned.

But that was starting to feel almost… boring. Predictable.

Which was when he had an idea: "All right. Here’s what I propose: I let all the Cybermen in here… roll out that blood-soaked red carpet for them, as promised. Then you and I leave, shutting the door behind us, so to speak. All the Cybermen stay trapped in this little pocket dimension with nothing but a wrecked planet to play around on. There's nothing left for them to use to get out once that happens, I saw to that—figured that you might get free somehow, and I couldn't let you go back to your little pets. But _they’ll_ be fine. No Cyber-conversion for them… I’ll even take care of the handful that I told that old tin can to deploy. Your little humans will be safe as houses right where they are… and that’s where they’ll stay, because you’ll be coming with me.”

She looked angry, but not surprised. “Where?”

“In my TARDIS, obviously. I’d prefer willingly, since it would be a pain to tie you up or something like that, but I’ll scrounge up some handcuffs if I have to. Oh, don’t look at me like that,” he said in response to her silent expression of disgust. “It’s not forever. We’d both get bored. So here is the arrangement I’m offering: ten trips in the TARDIS, going wherever I want to go, doing whatever I want to do. Maybe I’ll save a kitten caught in a tree. Maybe I’ll burn another planet down. We’ll see where the mood takes me. But you’ll be there with me the whole time. And then, after the tenth trip, I’ll drop you off at your TARDIS and we’ll go our separate ways. See one other at the next apocalypse. That’s the deal. What do you think?”

The Doctor was obviously thinking it over. The fact that she would even consider saying no was honestly a bit insulting, in his opinion.

“Will you take it?” he asked. “To save your little pets from the big bad Cyberwolves?” He leaned in as close as he could without touching the field and whispered: “Will you come with me?”

At last, she nodded. “Fine.”

He smirked and turned off the paralysis field. “Cheer up, Doctor… this might even be fun.”

* * *

“I see you kept the decor from the Outback,” she noted as they entered his TARDIS, which was still disguised as a cabin.

“Feel free to nose around the place if you like,” he said airily. “The controls won’t work for you—you’re not the only one who can bio-lock a TARDIS.” He grinned. “Cheer up! Remember back when we had that test run with the Mondasian ship over whether or not I could be whatever your sanctimonious definition of _‘good’_ was? Now we’ve swapped places.”

“I’m not helping you kill anyone.”

“Suit yourself. More for me, then. Speaking of which, I have some Cybermen to deal with. Make yourself at home… because, for the next ten trips, it _is_ your home.” He stroked his beard. “Hmm. I’ll have to find a sofa or something. We could be cozy and domestic together. Won’t that be nice?”

Her only response was a stony glare.

“See you when I get back from the office, love,” he teased, and then left.

* * *

When the Master got back, he found the Doctor asleep in a chair with her head resting on the nearby table.

“Hi honey, I’m home!” he called out with a giggle. This was going to be _so much_ fun.

She woke up slowly. He wondered when she had last slept… it might have been quite a while ago, given all the events that brought them back together. She rubbed at her eyes and looked at him with an expression he hadn’t anticipated: not hostility or even fear, but open curiosity.

“Oh, hello,” she said amiably. “Are we leaving soon?”

He was caught off guard, which was _not_ a nice feeling. “Well, you seem to have changed your tune rather quickly, Doctor.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I’m not a doctor.”

_Oh no…_

His suspicions were confirmed when he saw something hanging on a silver chain around her neck: a small locket in the shape of a clock face.

_Oh no you don’t._

“Give me the necklace,” he ordered.

“This?” She took it off and handed it to him with a shrug.

It wouldn’t open.

Before he could throw it on the ground, he heard a voice in his mind.

_“Contact.”_

Grimacing, he turned away from the woman still watching him with annoyingly innocent eyes and opened the connection between his mind and wherever the Doctor’s mind had ended up.

_“If you’re hearing this, it means that you just realised you couldn’t open the locket. Don’t bother replying, by the way: what you’re hearing is sort of a psychic voicemail.”_

He fought the urge to grumble out loud. Now he _definitely_ had a few choice words for her that he no longer had the opportunity to deliver.

_“You shouldn’t leave things like Chameleon Arches lying about like that, you know. People can get up to all sorts of mischief if left alone with one. So here’s_ _my_ _end of the deal: the locket will open after ten trips in the TARDIS. Until then, you’re stuck with your new human companion, Jenny Smith. I’ll still be travelling with you… I just won’t have to be there for it. Good news for you, though: she probably won’t try to escape or foil your plans. Won’t that be convenient?”_

He could feel himself beginning to tremble with fury. 

_“Of course, if you get sick of her and would rather be taunting me instead, all you have to do is take those ten trips very quickly… but then our deal will be fulfilled. So choose wisely—I suppose there’s a first time for everything.”_

The connection faded and he hurled the locket across the room.

“Oi!” the Doctor—no, he corrected himself, _Jenny—_ objected as she retrieved her necklace from where it had landed. “It’s not _my_ fault that it won’t open!”

“You’re not wrong,” he hissed. 

_What am I supposed to do with her?_

All of his little schemes, all of the things he had planned for their time together… and she wasn’t even really _here._

_How dare she… how_ _dare_ _she choose the coward’s way out!_

For a moment, he wondered if he should just kill her. It would probably be easy, seeing as she didn’t seem to distrust him.

However, killing her would deprive him of an audience, and that was the whole _point_ of this arrangement.

His rage made him dangerous… and it also made him foolish.

But he didn’t care. If she wanted to run from her problems and hide inside a little human costume… fine. 

_Two can play at that game._

A tiny voice in his mind pointed out that this was a monumentally _stupid_ idea that could backfire horribly and leave them both in an awful situation, but he really was far too angry to care. 

“Sit tight,” he ordered her, and set the coordinates for the first TARDIS trip: Bristol, 2017.


	2. Trip No. 1: Gallifrey Citadel to Bristol, 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Series 10, Episode 1: “The Pilot”

_“Bill, listen to me! Whatever she’s showing you, whatever she’s letting you see, it’s a lure, it’s a trap. She’s making you part of her, and you can never come back!”_

But Bill didn’t listen to him. He supposed he should have expected that; she seemed like the sort of person who wasn’t too keen on following directions.

But he would never find out whether that was really the case.

 _“I see what you see,”_ Bill said to the pilot… the one with Heather’s face. _“It’s beautiful.”_

What else could he say to convince her? _“Bill, let go! You have to let go! She is not human anymore!”_

He really thought that it would work. 

But it didn’t.

_“Goodbye, Doctor.”_

And then Bill Potts was gone.

The Doctor returned to St. Luke’s University and tried to forget.

She had been so bright, so curious, so tenacious. She reminded him of Susan in so many ways, which was why he had offered to be her tutor.

Only he had been reckless and it had cost Bill her life on her very first trip in the TARDIS.

Other than Nardole puttering around and the occasional student dropping round for what they had erroneously assumed were office hours, he had no one to talk to other than the person who was the real reason he was even here.

“I know that look,” Missy said, the next time he went to visit her in the vault. “You misplaced another one of your pets, didn’t you?”

“I’m in no mood for your taunting,” he snapped.

“Then why did you come down here?” she asked.

He didn’t have an answer for that.

“Did you want me to reassure you that you’re still a good person? That you’re a responsible steward of all the little people whose lives you hold in your hands?” She snorted. “Well, I’m not going to. You’re on your own for that.”

He sat there in silence for a few minutes while Missy did her best to piss him off, and then returned to his office in a foul mood.

His mood was not improved by the commotion he could hear out in the halls.

_Oh no… not them._

Two very familiar and _extremely annoying_ voices were making their way closer and closer to his office door.

He’d managed to avoid them so far by locking the door and pretending not to be in whenever he saw them coming, but that didn’t prevent him from having to overhear the human avatars of a tension headache.

“It’s not as if you have anything important to contribute anyway!” snapped the female Yorkshire accent that haunted his nightmares these days.

“I’m surprised you’re not back in the library ransacking the shelves for another useless out-of-date citation,” replied the very snippy male voice that also featured rather prominently in the aforementioned nightmares.

“It’s called ‘establishing the theoretical groundwork for one’s argument,’ but I suppose that you’ve never had a need for it, given that you barely provide _any_ evidence for your preposterous ideas!”

“Just because you have no imagination—”

“There’s a difference between ‘imagination’ and ‘delusion,’” she retorted. There was a banging on his office door. “Doctor? Are you in? I have some follow-up questions from yesterday’s lecture!”

“I was here first!” the man protested. Another hand started rapping on the door.

The Doctor tried not to _audibly_ groan. They would probably take it as some kind of encouragement if they overheard it.

Smith and Jones. Aside from the Time Lady locked up in the vault and the walking oddity that had been assigned to make sure that the Doctor kept to his end of the deal, those two students were the current banes of his existence.

Jenny Smith: blunt, analytical, able to take a hypothesis and practically _hammer_ it into the ground under the weight of dozens of pieces of supporting evidence, with a tendency to go off on tangents until everyone forgot the original point she was making—including herself.

Harry Jones: intuitive, charismatic, able to connect one point of information to another through the kind of logical leaps that were closer to a stone skipping across the surface of the water than to any kind of proof, with a tendency to wax poetic on whatever topic happened to have caught his fancy that day until his audience was a dizzying combination of perplexed and convinced.

And they _hated_ each other.

It was impossible for one of them to finish a sentence without the other one jumping in with a furious contradiction. Their arguments were a strident onslaught of citations, condescension, and personal insults, during which no one in the vicinity could get a word in edgewise.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the fact that they kept having their arguments _during his lectures._ And outside his office. And in the halls of nearly every building on campus. One couldn’t throw a rock at St. Luke’s without hitting Smith and Jones bickering with one another about _something._

And, much to the Doctor’s dismay, they were the two brightest students the University ever had.

He had once overheard a group of other students talking about them, and learned that they lived in the same building, with Smith’s flat directly below the one that Jones lived in. There had apparently been a months-long war between them over who could inconvenience the other most by banging on the ceiling (in the case of Smith) or stomping on the floor (in the case of Jones).

“I wish they’d hurry up and start shagging,” one of the students complained. “At least then their mouths would be too busy to talk.”

The Doctor silently agreed.

* * *

“—and what _I’m_ trying to say, if you would pay attention long enough to listen, is that the density doesn’t matter enough to make a difference in the overall durability!”

“First of all,” Jenny said, rolling her eyes so hard that she briefly worried about ocular damage, “‘durability’ is a vague and unhelpful term—much like you, I would add—and second, an increase of 0.02 percent would add another 75 kilograms to the total load, which would then increase the likelihood of structural collapse by 5.8 percent! Or did you happen to miss that entry-level physics course?”

“Among the things _you_ just missed—and trust me, there were many—was my very bad pun about how it doesn’t _matter.”_ Harry was apparently defaulting to his usual expression: an extremely cocky smirk. “Density? Matter? Get it?”

“I can’t tell which is more obnoxious right now: your attempt at humor or your vest.” She gathered up her notes and started to leave the lecture hall, only to turn back to face him after a single step towards the door. “Try again when you’ve got actual calculations behind your argument.”

“It’s not as if it’s _difficult,”_ he scoffed. “Or did you lose the ability to add after four PM?”

“It’s only three-forty.”

“Try again, Smith,” Harry said, holding up that ridiculously gaudy wristwatch of his. “It’s four-fifteen.”

As annoyed as she was to be wrong, Jenny was actually a little disturbed. “Have we been shouting at one another for forty-five minutes?” It really didn’t seem like it had been that long: the Doctor was finishing up his lecture on the use of historical materials in modern construction when Harry asked an inane question—“well, it’s more of a comment than a question,” as he had prefaced it—that any halfway intelligent person would have known the answer to with their eyes closed and three pints of lager in their system, and took it extremely badly when Jenny had pointed this out to him… and somehow they were still in the now-empty lecture hall arguing over whether or not there was a material difference in granite from northern Wales and granite from the southwest of England.

_‘Material’ difference… oh, that’s an awful joke. Bet he’d love it._

That smirk was _still there._ “Well, time just _flies_ by when you’re around,” he drawled. “I feel closer to my inevitable death already.”

“Couldn’t come soon enough in my opinion.” She tried to leave again but couldn’t resist delivering one last parting shot: “It would be easy enough to prove that I’m right, you know: this building and the library building have granite foundations, only they were built sixty years apart. Prior to 1950, the main source of granite was from the region near Snowdon, but after that it was mostly sourced from Devon because it was closer.” She held up the pages of her notes, which were now badly crumpled due to her gripping it in her hands so tightly. “And before you ask, yes, I have citations: geological surveys going back to 1903 and the facilities records from the Board of Regents’ meetings prior to the construction of both buildings.”

“Fine,” Harry said. “I’ll play your game, Smith. Meet you back in the courtyard in an hour.”

“Bring a hammer,” she said. “You might get the chance to use it—on yourself, ideally.”

Now the truly awkward bit had to happen: both of them stormed off towards their residences, which happened to be in the same building, while pointedly ignoring the other the entire time.

* * *

“So, what, you’re just going to chip a piece off, then?” Harry asked, leaning against the side of the Main Building with his arms crossed as Jenny prodded at the base of the north wall with a ball-peen hammer. He hadn’t bothered to bring one… partially because he refused to follow her orders, and partially because he didn’t actually own any tools.

“No—all right, not unless I have to,” she conceded. She put in the earbuds of the stethoscope she had hanging around her neck, briefly tangling one arm of it in the ugly necklace she was always wearing. “There are spots where the slabs of granite meet that…” She held the resonator against the stone and then gave the wall a tiny tap with the hammer. “Hmm.”

“What?” he asked impatiently. Her tendency to get distracted by something mid-sentence sometimes made it nearly impossible to have a decent debate with her.

“Shush,” she replied, then gave the wall another tap. Her frown deepened. “That’s a bit odd.”

“Either enlighten me or let me have a go,” he demanded, reaching for the hammer.

In response, Jenny gave his knuckles a sharp rap with the hammer. It wasn’t _hard,_ but it was certainly _painful._ She waited until he had finished swearing before she continued: “There’s far too much resonance,” she said.

Harry found himself asking a question that he despised, especially where Jenny was concerned: “What do you mean?”

“There’s three floors, plus a basement, right?”

He nodded.

“What I’m hearing… there’s too much resonance for there to be only four stories total.”

Harry decided to hold off on asking her how in the hell she could tell how much interior space there was inside of a granite structure just by hitting it with a hammer, and instead made another grab for it. He managed to wrest it away from her and get the stethoscope as well, with the added bonus that the earpieces once again got caught on that necklace and caused her some momentary discomfort before she could untangle it.

He’d be lying if he hadn’t thought about actually strangling her at least once… once a week, more accurately.

But, somehow, when he mimicked her actions of listening to the sound of a hammer tapping lightly against the stone… he could sense it too: the feeling of there being more space inside than there ought to be. 

“Have you ever walked around the building?” she asked, getting to her feet. 

“No,” he admitted, joining her and handing back the tools. 

“Me either.” Jenny tucked the items back into her bag. “Now’s as good a time as any, I suppose.”

A group of familiar-looking classmates walked by at that moment, took one look at them, and then sped up to get out of range. Faintly, Harry could hear them whispering… and giggling.

“They think we’re sleeping together,” he remarked.

She responded with a look of disgust. “The only time I’m going to wrap _anything_ around you is my hands around your throat,” she said.

 _Apparently I’m not the only one who’s considered the whole strangling thing,_ he thought with a faint smile.

“What are you smirking about?” she demanded.

“I’m not smirking!”

“You’re always smirking. Now tell—” 

Jenny stopped both walking and speaking—in fact, the former happened so suddenly that Harry crashed into her.

“Watch it!” he hissed.

“Look,” she said urgently. “Back door.”

Harry didn’t see what was so alarming about a door to a bloody building, seeing as having only one exit was a massively stupid idea, until he noticed the stairs leading down to it.

There were quite a lot of stairs. More than a single story, in fact.

“It’s strange,” Jenny said, suddenly whispering. “It’s almost like my eyes can’t focus on it. Like something’s telling me to just keep walking.”

Harry couldn’t even take the opportunity to lord it over her for being an unobservant ass because (to his complete irritation) he realised that she was correct: there was something about the whole area that seemed almost _aggressively_ uninteresting.

“Lucky for us that we’re both stubborn as rocks,” he noted, and started down the stairs.

That feeling of artificial disinterest only increased the further they went; the sole thing that kept him from turning around and leaving was Jenny’s presence behind him and his utter conviction to not be the one to call this off.

Once they reached the bottom, he tried the knob to the very nondescript door, only to find that it was locked.

“Let me try,” Jenny insisted, reaching past him by nearly climbing over his shoulder.

“I already tried it—” he protested, trying to shove her off but not quite managing it in the tiny space.

Her fingers had barely brushed the door when it opened.

“Well,” she said with a satisfied grin, “that’s rather handy, isn’t it?”

He glared at her in silence.

“Oh, come on,” Jenny said teasingly. “Handy? Because my hand—”

“Yes, I got it,” he grumbled.

“It’s hardly worse than your lame jokes,” she pointed out. “Now get moving.”

They had only gone a few steps when they reached an open space. It featured two things of note: a very elaborate set of doors with a set of lights where a lock should be, and a pale bald man in a tweed suit.

He looked extremely startled to see them. “How did you get down here?” he asked.

“There was a door,” Harry pointed out. “So… the usual way that one gets places.”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t have—” The pale man pushed his spectacles up his nose as he looked past them in the direction from which they had come. “The perception filters should have worked…” he muttered to himself.

Harry exchanged a glance with Jenny. Something very interesting was obviously going on.

At last, the man turned his attention back to them. “Students aren’t allowed down here,” he said primly.

“We were just having a nose around the place. I’m Jenny Smith,” she said by way of introduction.

Harry pushed his way in with an outstretched hand and a wide grin. “Harry Jones.”

“Yes, I know who you are,” the man said, looking suddenly very tired.

“What’s behind the door?” Harry asked once it became clear that the man wasn’t going to shake his hand.

Jenny, meanwhile, had gone to examine the circular symbols etched on the door. “Are these supposed to mean something?” she asked. “It almost looks like language.”

Oh, this was _definitely_ interesting. “Have you got something locked up in there?”

“No!” the pale man said sharply. “Now please—”

He was interrupted by the faint sound of music.

“Well, you’ve obviously got a _piano_ locked up in there,” Harry pointed out, trying not to snicker. “Who’s playing it?”

“No one,” the pale man said, his expression increasingly strained. 

Harry gave him a look of amusement. “What, it’s just playing itself?”

The man didn’t blink. “Yes.” His eyes briefly darted to one side. “It’s an automatic one.”

“And you’ve got it locked up?” Jenny asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s very valuable.”

The piano music changed suddenly to ‘Shave and a Haircut.’ Jenny knocked twice on the door for the ‘two bits’ portion of the tune.

“Get away from there!” the pale man said, now genuinely alarmed. “Students aren’t permitted down here, I told you, so go away before—”

He was interrupted by a new, much stranger sound: a whooshing metallic rasp, over and over in a slow rhythm.

Harry didn’t think it was possible for the man to get even more pale, but he managed it. “Oh no,” he whispered in horror. “Not now.”

* * *

Being insulted by Missy wasn’t exactly the Doctor’s idea of a good time, but it was either that or eat takeaway food by himself in his office. The Main Building was empty—the students had a tendency to flee the moment that classes were over—so he could indulge in a little laziness and take the TARDIS down to the Vault.

He was familiar with the very subjective way that time tended to move, causing some minutes to pass in the blink of an eye while others seemed to last for years. His lecture earlier today fell squarely into the latter category. He really thought that he would finally get through it without being interrupted, and he was _so close,_ and then Jones opened his damned mouth and everything immediately went downhill. He wasn’t entirely certain that Jones or Smith noticed that everyone else had left.

His ex-friend had an extensive list of faults, but at least she wasn’t constantly shouting in this regeneration.

Nardole was going to scold him for using the TARDIS, because Nardole scolded him for nearly everything these days, but it wasn’t the little man’s job or his promise or his TARDIS, so the Doctor had no reason to pay attention to a word that he said.

He still braced himself as he opened the door of the TARDIS.

As he looked out at what was waiting for him outside, however, he realised that he hadn’t braced himself _enough,_ because in addition to an obviously mortified Nardole, the Doctor also found himself face to face with the wide-eyed countenances of both Jenny Smith and Harry Jones.

“What are you doing here?” the Doctor demanded at the same time that Smith shouted “How did you do that?” and Jones shouted “What is that thing?”

However, before the Doctor could give them both a forceful “None of your business,” Smith’s jaw dropped and she turned to Nardole. _“That’s_ why you looked familiar: you’re the Doctor’s… porter? Assistant?”

“Valet,” Nardole grumbled.

“How did you let them get down here?” the Doctor asked him.

“They just wandered in through the bloody door! I don’t know how they managed it: the perception filters are still in place, they shouldn’t have gotten anywhere near here.”

“Perception filter?” Smith asked. “Like some sort of psychic security system?” She glanced at Jones. “That must have been—”

“—what we felt while we were heading down the stairs,” he finished with a nod. “That’s… that’s impressive. How’d you manage that?”

The Doctor groaned wearily. The only upside to these circumstances was that the two students were actually agreeing on something for once; the downside, however, was that it was because they were now focused on _him._

He’d have to erase their memories, but if the two of them had managed to just saunter past a perception filter and a bio-locked door, he was a bit uneasy at the possibility that it might not actually _work_ on them.

On the other hand…

_Oh no you don’t. Don’t even consider it._

“Right,” Smith said, starting to pace, “we’ve got a psychic field, a sub-basement that isn’t in any of the building plans, a mysteriously locked door with unrecognizable symbols etched into it—”

“Have you got a _person_ locked inside, by the way?” Jones asked. He stepped around a still-pacing Smith and knocked on the door in the rhythm of ‘Shave and a Haircut’—

—to which Missy replied with a minor chord rendition of ‘two bits’ on the piano—

_Of course she’d find a way to make it worse._

“—and, _most importantly,”_ Smith continued with a glare in Jones’ direction, “there’s a police box that just teleported in out of nowhere.”

“Well, that bit was _obvious,”_ he retorted.

“So what I think,” she said to the Doctor, “is that you’re not from around here. And by ‘here’ I mean 2017. And possibly Earth as well.”

“Alien, maybe?” Jones suggested with a grin that didn’t make it entirely clear whether he was agreeing with Smith or just teasing her. “Would explain why people say you’ve worked here for over fifty years and only look _slightly_ ancient.”

Now the Doctor wasn’t sure if Jones was teasing _him._ “I moisturize. Now scram.”

The pair of nuisances exchanged another look; this one was uncomfortably conspiratorial. “Doctor,” Smith said, obviously trying not to laugh, “I mean this sincerely… when have _either_ of us ever listened to a single thing you’ve told us to do?”

He felt an ache in his hearts.

_Just like Bill._

_And it got her killed._

“I—” The Doctor wasn’t sure what he was about to say, and never got the chance to find out, because he belatedly realised that he hadn’t closed the TARDIS door behind him.

And both Smith and Jones just realised that as well.

“Is that…?” Jones asked as he and Smith moved towards the TARDIS. 

_“No.”_ The Doctor quickly shut the door.

“Oh, come _on!”_ Jones objected, looking a bit put out. 

Smith, meanwhile, had a gleam in her eye that was making the Doctor very uneasy. “It looks like you have a choice here, Doctor: show us what’s behind _that_ door—” she pointed at the TARDIS, “—or show us what’s behind _this_ door.” She pointed back at the door to the vault.

“The lady or the tiger,” the Doctor muttered to himself, honestly unsure which one was which.

“Because you’ve got to know by now that if you _don’t_ tell us,” Jones added, “we’ll just put all our energy into trying to find out, and will probably end up causing a massive amount of carnage along the way.”

_The lady it is, then._

The Doctor opened the door to the TARDIS again and stepped aside to let them enter.

“Shut _up,”_ Jones breathed in awe.

 _“You_ shut up,” Smith snapped, elbowing him in the ribs.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” he shot back. “It’s…”

_Here it comes…_

“It’s dimensionally transcendental,” Smith interrupted, amazed.

Jones nodded in delight. “Quantum folding, do you think? I’d read about it being theoretically possible—”

“You _read_ something? Now I’m really astonished.”

He rolled his eyes. “If I slip a nasty note under your door every morning, will that finally prove to you that I’m literate?”

The Doctor frowned. This was not the reaction he typically got.

“If it’s a transcendental pocket dimension,” Smith mused as if Jones hadn’t spoken, “then it would be able to move relative to any point in space and time, wouldn’t it?”

“Time travel _and_ teleportation!” Jones cried. 

“This is _brilliant,”_ Smith said, finally remembering that the Doctor was there. “Can we see how it works?”

“I…” The Doctor was still trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Usually he had to do a lot more explaining before getting to this point.

“Please?” they said in unison, sounding like a pair of children on Christmas morning.

It was only then that the Doctor noticed that, if his ability to estimate human ages was still reliable, Smith and Jones were both _older_ than the typical students at St. Luke’s by at least a decade. Well, that might explain why they didn’t seem to socialise with anyone but one another.

 _Though given their demeanor,_ _that’s_ _not much of a surprise…_

But something about them was strangely familiar: an odd sort of patter back and forth, vitriol mixed with a twisted kind of respect, acknowledging the other’s strengths while trying to exploit every possible weakness… 

Without meaning to, the Doctor’s eyes flicked in the direction of the vault.

_I had a friend like that once. So fast, so funny, so clever…_

_Maybe I still do have that friend. I suppose that’s the point of all this, isn’t it?_

“All right,” he said, already knowing what a disaster this was likely to turn into, _“one_ trip.”

“Doctor,” Nardole warned. “You’re supposed to stay here to guard—”

“Put the kettle on, Nardole,” he replied. “I’ll be back before the water boils.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Don't worry! Bill's okay! She just left to have cute Space Adventures with her magic girlfriend now as opposed to leaving at the end of Series 10. But she is very much missed and would probably have thrown a brick at Jenny and Harry's heads if she'd been forced to spend any time around them.)


	3. Trips No. 2 & 3: Bristol to Human Colony 488, Starship Erehwon (and Back Again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Series 10, Episode 2: “Smile”

“Well, you’re not moping, so I assume that your new pets came back safely?” Missy said, perching herself on top of the piano.

“Not for lack of trying,” the Doctor grumbled, taking a seat on the piano bench. “I brought curry, incidentally. Care for a samosa?”

“It had better have some actual heat behind it this time,” she sniffed as she took the takeaway box he offered her. “So, how did you nearly get them killed this time?”

He flinched.

“What, too soon?” she asked sweetly.

The Doctor glared at her. 

“Don’t wield those eyebrows at me like that,” Missy warned him. “You’ll pull a muscle.” She took a bite of the samosa. “Not bad. You obviously have a story to share, so let’s get on with it, shall we?”

He sighed. “All right. For starters, it really _was_ supposed to be quick and uneventful: a jaunt to an early human colony planet, take a brief tour around, have a snack, then pop right back to the present day.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so mystified when things go wrong… you’re always finding trouble whether you like it or not.” Her eyes were bright with amusement. “Let me guess: some nasty piece of new human tech went rogue and tried to murder everyone?”

The Doctor nodded wearily. “And I couldn’t have picked a worse scenario if I tried: the nanobots that were sent on ahead to prepare the planet for the colonists misinterpreted grief as a virus and proceeded to kill anyone who wasn’t happy. Which, of course, did wonders for the overall mood there.”

“Nanobots,” Missy laughed. “Useless little things if you’re trying to build something, extremely useful if you’re trying to slaughter everyone very creatively.”

“Yes,” he conceded. “So we all had to pretend to be happy in order to not be killed by the murderous robots, which would have been a bit of a trial for anyone—”

“Especially for anyone who had to witness your terrifying attempt at a smile,” Missy interjected.

“—but presented a rather formidable challenge for this particular pair, who are both little balls of anger and indignance and have absolutely no emotional control to speak of.”

“Are you sure you’re not counting yourself among them?”

He shook his head. “Trust me, if you spent more than ten seconds around them, you’d find me almost pleasant by comparison.”

She snorted. “I’d like to see _that.”_

* * *

“I can’t believe we’re about to be murdered by a bloody AIBO,” Harry muttered through the clenched teeth that were the closest thing to a smile he could muster up at the moment. “I didn’t exactly count ‘robot’ as my most likely cause of death.”

“They’re just the interface,” Jenny corrected him; apparently mortal peril wasn’t enough to keep her from being characteristically pedantic. “The actual robots are the Vardies.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re going to be the one responsible for getting me killed by robot _interfaces_ who can electrocute us with a single touch if we stop looking happy.”

“How am _I_ getting you killed?” she demanded. “They’re the ones doing the zapping thing, not me!”

“Because you’re _pissing me off,_ which is making it difficult to keep a smile on my face even though my life _literally_ depends on it.”

“You’re not exactly pleasant company either, you know. Should we split up?”

Harry took a deep breath and tried to rein in the emotional impulse to either argue with her about it or agree to split up just to get some peace and quiet. They had to be smart about this: would going at it alone increase their odds of survival?

To his annoyance, he realised that the answer was ‘no.’ “Together, we can watch one another’s backs.”

“Literally,” she agreed grimly. “Your emoji display has some rather frightful eyebrows right now, by the way.”

“Don’t tell me that!” he snapped. “It’ll just cause a feedback loop!”

“I figured you’d want to know!”

He rolled his eyes. “Not _everything_ needs to be backed up with data, you know.”

“Do you really want to fight about this now?”

_“You’re_ the one who started it!”

“Shush!” Jenny hissed. “We know where we need to go, right? So let’s just spend the walk there trying to keep our minds off of it.”

“And how do you propose we do that?”

He could practically hear her teeth grinding together from the effort to keep smiling. “We talk about something else,” she said. “Literally anything else. You start.”

“Why do _I_ have to start?”

“I was trying to be polite, but _fine,_ I’ll start: according to the scanners when they gave us those algae cubes, the Doctor’s got two hearts. Why do you think that is?”

All right, that _was_ admittedly an interesting distraction. “It seems a bit redundant,” he mused, “seeing as he’s basically human-sized. Stands to reason there would be a similarly sized circulatory system, so unless his blood needs a _lot_ more oxygen a binary vascular system would be overkill.”

“So we’re in agreement that he’s definitely an alien, then.”

He nodded. “Aliens who look like humans… I always thought it was a very unrealistic trope.”

“Exactly!” she agreed. “What are the odds that convergent evolution could happen in so many places? Basically impossible. Really, _any_ kind of humanoid species is rather unlikely. There’s nothing inherently superior about bipedal vertebrates that would make them the standard template for intelligent life.”

“Give me some spider people any day,” he grinned—a genuine smile for the first time since they realised that they might be about to die at the hands of some kind of Happiness Patrol.

“You’re thinking small,” she noted, but without any of her usual condescension—in fact, she was beaming as well. “What about sound-based intelligence? It wouldn’t even need a physical form aside from a medium to vibrate in… taking in energy and converting it into sonic vibrations.”

“How would you know if it was intelligent?”

“The music would be danceable, of course,” she replied with a smirk, then widened her eyes as an idea occurred to her. “Oh… you know what’s good at manipulating moods?”

It was an obvious answer to an equally obvious question: “Music,” he said. “Have you got any on your mobile?”

“I’d have to look it up… but I’m not sure I get service in… in wherever we are. _When_ ever we are. Not a lot of convenient satellites around. You?”

Harry started scrolling through his phone… “Ugh. All right, I’ve got something. But you’ve got to promise me that you won’t be judgmental about it.”

“I make no such promises.”

Grimacing, he hit play and upbeat synth pop filled the air.

Jenny’s face lit up with imminent laughter. “You’re kidding,” she giggled.

“Shut up and dance!” he ordered as Lady Gaga started singing:

> _I wanna hold ‘em like they do in Texas, please_
> 
> _Fold ‘em, let ‘em hit me, raise it baby, stay with me_
> 
> _Luck and intuition play the cards with spades to start_
> 
> _And after she’s been hooked I’ll play the one that’s on his heart_

“It won’t work if you’re not enjoying yourself,” Jenny pointed out, flailing her arms in a way that she apparently considered to be ‘dancing.’

And then she started _singing,_ which was even more cringe-inducing: _“I’ll get him hot, show him what I’ve got!”_

Somehow the mortification got so severe that it went a full-180 degrees back around to being hilarious: Harry starting _cackling._

And then joined in on the singing: _“_ _Can’t read my, can’t read my, no he can’t read my poker face!”_

“Dance faster!” Jenny said, grabbing him by the hand and pulling him along after her. 

Harry almost tripped over her in the process. “Are you sure you’re descended from a species with only two legs?” he complained. “How is it possible for someone to be _this_ uncoordinated?”

“We’re not on _Britain’s Got Talent,”_ she scoffed, then yelped as he twirled her around, “and this song isn’t going to last forever, so get a shift on.”

“What, you don’t want to hear the rest of my excellent playlist?” he said, mock-offended.

“I know you put your speakers on the floor of your flat so you can blast music through my ceiling in the middle of the night. If I hear ‘Voodoo Child’ one more time, I think I’ll go mad.”

“That’s the idea!” Harry replied cheerfully.

“Do you even know what a guitar is?” she asked, dragging him down the hall again.

“I’ll look it up later, once we’re not boogieing for our lives.”

“Shush,” Jenny scolded him. “You’re killing the mood.”

“Not the only thing that’s at risk of being killed,” he pointed out, then spun her around again.

It was probably the dizziness, but Jenny was actually squealing with delight. “This is almost fun, don’t you think?”

“It is,” he conceded. Something about the way her face lit up, slightly flushed from the physical activity, made Harry’s thoughts get a bit fuzzy for a moment. “Say, assuming we make it out of here, would you—”

“Here’s the door!” she cried, pulling him inside after her. “Shut it!” she ordered, taking off her shoulder bag and rummaging through it. 

It was only after Harry had closed the door behind them, did his best to enable what he hoped was the locking mechanism, and turned off the music, that he noticed they weren’t alone in the room. “Smith!” he said sharply. “I wouldn’t drop that smile just yet.”

Only a few meters away was another one of those damned robot interfaces. 

“Not to worry,” Jenny said, her hand still inside her bag. Contrary to any sense of self-preservation, she started moving _towards_ the robot. “I’m actually rather happy at the moment.”

Before Harry could ask what she meant by that, Jenny pulled the ball peen hammer from her bag and brought it down on the robot’s chest area with a surprising amount of force. 

The robot emitted a shower of sparks and then went still, its screens having gone dark as well.

“Bloody hell,” Harry noted, impressed, “you’re stronger than you look.”

She turned back to him with a wide grin. “Better remember that the next time you’ve got a snotty comment. Now let’s figure out if there’s a central control of some kind.”

“I’ll see what I can find through the console,” he said. “You keep poking around inside the murderbot.”

For once, she didn’t argue about the terminology, and reached back into her bag to retrieve a multitool. 

The computer systems were a bit confusing, but eventually Harry was able to navigate through it to the colony ship’s schematics. The engine room was in the direction that the Doctor had been heading in, there were several exits from the ship into the larger complex, and a rather large chamber that was using a lot more power than it should have been…

“Oh, that’s not good…” he murmured.

“What?” Jenny demanded.

“This isn’t the _first_ ship,” Harry said, his eyes still locked on the screen. “This is the _only_ ship. All the colonists… they’re already here, in deep freeze.”

Her jaw dropped. “When they wake up, they’re not going to know what’s happened.”

“Not just that,” he whispered as he pulled up another systems menu. “They’re waking up _now.”_

“Right, then,” the Doctor said. “It’s time to think of a new plan.” His voice was a tiny buzz in their ears.

It wasn’t a dignified response, but Harry couldn’t keep himself from emitting a startled yelp. He had forgotten about the communicators that had been implanted into them when they arrived.

Jenny, for her part, was blushing fiercely. “How much did you overhear?”

“Every horrible second of it,” the Doctor confirmed wearily. “Now let’s start spitballing ideas before a massacre begins.”

* * *

“We figured it out in the end, of course,” the Doctor concluded, setting a mostly empty box of chicken tikka on the floor next to his seat.

“You reset the nanobots to the point before they made the error that grief was a problem to be eradicated,” Missy said.

He nodded. “Then brokered a peace between the Vardies and the human colonists.”

“And _then_ fled back to the present day for some peace and quiet,” she prompted him.

One side of his mouth twitched in a half-smile. “Never thought you’d qualify as ‘peace and quiet.’”

“I like that Harry’s taste in music.”

The Doctor sighed. “Of course you do.”

“Remember that time with the Toclafane when I used ‘Voodoo Child’ as a soundtrack for all that mayhem?” She made a sound of amusement. “Back when I had _you_ under lock and key.”

“It was a rubbish song.”

“Come to think of it, I was calling myself Harry as well.” Missy gave him a smile that he did not like at all. “What a very interesting coincidence, don’t you think?”

“That’s all it is,” the Doctor said sharply. “Lots of people are named Harry, and it was a very popular song for some unfathomable reason.”

But she kept smiling at him until he left the vault and returned to his office.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Hey, can anyone suggest a dorky pop song that two people could theoretically dance badly to while fleeing for their lives, that ISN'T a Eurovision song?" — an actual question I asked in a group chat while writing this chapter.


	4. Trips No. 4 & 5: Bristol to London, 1814 (and Back Again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Series 10, Episode 3: “Thin Ice”

The Doctor had been adamant after the incident with the Vardies that their trip was a one-time opportunity that would not be repeated. Smith and Jones argued with him for nearly an hour, but he held firm. It was his TARDIS and therefore his decision. 

“I am not a tour guide,” he said. “I don’t have time to take you sightseeing.”

“It’s a _time machine,”_ Smith protested. “You’ve got plenty of time if you plan it out properly.”

“I have other things to do.”

“Like feed your guest down in the vault?” Jones asked. He answered the Doctor’s suspicious frown with a grin. “You’ve got two burritos in that bag you’re holding.”

The Doctor clutched the bag a little tighter, annoyed at how defensive he probably looked. “I’m very hungry.”

“I know that restaurant too: the burritos are enormous. Unless your stomach is dimensionally transcendental as well, there’s no way you could eat two of them in one sitting.”

“So you might as well not lie about it,” Smith added.

The Doctor shooed them out and resolved to avoid them as much as he could, which was likely to be a bit difficult seeing as they attended his lectures. 

“I thought you’d taken them on as… what do you call them, ‘companions’?” Missy inquired when he brought her the burrito she requested.

“It was just a one-off,” he said, still feeling uncomfortably defensive. “I’m supposed to stay put and guard you.”

“You’re awful at staying put,” she countered. “What’s the real reason?”

He remained silent.

“Ah,” Missy said, a bit too knowingly as usual, “you’re afraid of getting them killed like you did with your last one.”

“Shut up,” he hissed.

“I’m right, though. Losing that girl has you spooked. You don’t hide your fear, or your grief, _or_ your self-loathing very well, Doctor. It’s written all over your face.”

“They almost died during that trip,” he said quietly, “and I couldn’t help them. If they hadn’t been clever—”

“But that’s the whole point,” she protested. “They’re clever. You find clever little humans and you throw them at puzzles and sometimes they discover something that you missed. Usually. At least these two seem bright enough to ask the right questions.”

The Doctor felt himself smile just a little. “Never heard you compliment a human before.”

“I’m getting sentimental in my old age. Plus, they seem to have a knack for driving you mental, which I appreciate as a fellow artist in that medium.”

“They’re like if Amy and Rory were drunk and disorderly.”

“Shame I never met those two. Which, I’ll remind you, is why I haven’t the _faintest idea_ what you mean by that comparison.”

He sighed. “I haven’t travelled with anyone for so long, I might have gotten out of the habit.”

“Well, it would be a disappointment to see you lose your edge. You’d be considerably less fun.”

“Why are you suddenly so hellbent on this?” he asked.

Missy shrugged. “It’s better than having you mope. Besides, I find it amusing when Nardole gets indignant. His voice goes all squeaky.”

The Doctor returned to his office that evening still determined to not put anyone else at risk… but he was a bit less certain than he had been only a few hours before.

* * *

“He’s in,” Jenny whispered as they approached the Doctor’s office. “I can hear him moving about.”

Harry wasn’t quite as optimistic about their chances. “He might have locked the door.”

“Right, well, despite all his fancy alien technology, he still uses the bolt to lock it.” She held up a ring of keys. “I nicked this from the porter. We can let ourselves in if we have to.”

“He’ll be cross,” Harry pointed out.

“Who, the porter?”

“No, the Doctor. It’s not going to help our case.”

“Will you stop worrying?” Jenny said, beginning to sound impatient. “I’m sure we can convince him that it’s important. He didn’t want to take us sightseeing, but if we tell him there’s a reason for it—”

“I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it will be _harder.”_

Luck was on their side: the door was unlocked.

“What now?” the Doctor groaned before they could say anything.

“We wanted to ask you something,” Jenny began.

“No. Now get out.”

“You haven’t even heard what it was!”

“I can _guess,”_ he said. “It involves a big blue box and a lot of gawking.”

“We’re not going to _gawk,”_ she protested.

“That’s what you do when you travel. Go to a place and gawk.”

“Then that applies to you as well, doesn’t it?”

“And you’ll notice that I’m _here.”_

“We’ve got a reason, though,” Harry finally cut in. “There’s an academic debate that we’re trying to resolve.”

The Doctor looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “You want me to help you with your _homework?”_

“Independent research,” Jenny corrected him. “Historical engineering and condensed matter physics, related to the effects of human-generated waste on the natural formation of ice.”

“She wants to know if the ice on the Thames melting in the early 19th century was impacted by impurities in the water or if it was just due to a change in climate,” Harry explained. 

“Not _if,”_ she objected. _“How._ I’ve been doing estimates on the types and amounts of pollution that would have been present in the water at the time, but they’re just estimates. Data collection didn’t really start until the 1850s with the Great Stink, but the last time the Thames froze over to an extent significant enough to test was in 1814.”

“Because the Little Ice Age was ending,” he countered. “Not because people were shitting in the river.”

“This was two years _before_ the ‘Year Without a Summer’! The Little Ice Age didn’t end until—”

“Is there a point to this revolting topic?” the Doctor interjected.

“Well,” Jenny said, blushing slightly, “I thought that if I could go take some samples of the ice from back then, it would help with my analysis.”

“Which she’s only doing because I’m working on a paper of my own,” Harry complained.

“Proving you wrong would be a nice bonus,” she admitted, “but that’s not the main reason.” She looked squarely at the Doctor. “I hate to use coercion, but if we could resolve the question then we’d finally stop arguing about it.”

The Doctor massaged his temples, as if trying to fight off an impending headache. “This is the most ridiculous reason to use the TARDIS I’ve ever heard.”

“Might be,” Harry said. “But ridiculous usually implies some level of ‘fun’ as well. So…” He grinned. “Could we have a little fun?”

There was a tense silence as the Doctor considered their request. At last, he sighed. “Fine. But there and back, that’s _it.”_

“Oh, brilliant!” Jenny cried out triumphantly. “Can we go now? I’ve got my sampling materials in my bag already.”

“You were _that_ certain your argument would work?”

She tried and failed to look innocent. “I’m an optimist.” She pointed at Harry. _“He’s_ the pessimist.”

“I’m the _realist,”_ Harry retorted.

“Behave, you two, or I’ll turn this thing around,” the Doctor said, opening the door of the TARDIS.

“What year?” he asked once they were inside. 

“London, fifth of February, 1814,” Jenny replied promptly. “The date of the last Frost Fair.”

As the Doctor entered the coordinates, Harry realised a potential problem. “We’re not dressed for 1814. We’re going to stand out.”

“We’ll have to be quick then,” Jenny said, obviously disappointed. “Shame. I would have liked to look around.”

“First door on the left, second right, under the stairs, past the bins, fifth door on the left,” the Doctor told them.

“What’s that?” Harry asked.

“The wardrobe. Pick an outfit.”

“Well, that’s handy,” Jenny said, impressed. “Though you’re a bit taller than both of us.”

“Not an issue,” the Doctor explained. “By the time you hit two thousand years old, you accumulate a pretty sizeable selection of clothes.”

“You’re _two thousand years old?”_

“You’re kidding,” Harry protested.

The Doctor didn’t bat an eye. “Might be. How would you know?”

Harry sighed. “Come on,” he said to Jenny, “let’s see what he’s got.”

The answer was ‘a _lot_ of clothes.’

“Do you think he was telling the truth?” Jenny asked, rummaging through a rack of shirts. “That he’s thousands of years old?”

“Why not?” Harry was trying to decide between two tailcoats. “He’s an alien, maybe his species is really long-lived. We already knew he’d been at St. Luke’s for decades.”

She considered it for a moment and then shook her head. “I’m trying to puzzle out how it would work… accumulate enough cellular mutations over the years and things would start to break down or at least change drastically. You’d need some kind of hard reset every couple hundred years.”

“Maybe that’s what happens,” Harry suggested. “When things start getting off-track, he does a full cellular refresh.”

“We should ask him.”

“He’d probably be cagey about it. He’s cagey about everything. On the other hand,” he noted, “he does like going on about things at length.”

“Like some other people I could name,” she said with a laugh. She held up an armful of clothes. “What do you think? Regency enough?”

Harry blinked. “Those are trousers.”

“So?”

“Women didn’t wear trousers back then.”

“I _know,_ but I’m still not putting on a dress. Or a skirt.”

He scoffed. “Well, if you’re not going to do that, what’s the point of changing clothes at all?” He was actually almost impressed that she’d managed to make the ensemble match at all—Jenny’s usual attire was an assortment of ugly t-shirts, neon braces, calf-length trousers, and the dirtiest pair of boots he’d ever seen in his life.

“I’ll manage,” she said. “It’s all in the swagger.” She left to go find a spot to change.

Harry snorted quietly to himself and then resumed his search for a proper cravat.

* * *

“Put that _down!”_ Harry complained, obviously a bit grossed out.

To be fair, Jenny _had_ just picked up a handful of animal waste… or was it alien waste? Either way, she knew it had to be valuable if Lord Sutcliffe had employed this many people to dredge it out of the river.

“Strange hue to it,” she noted, giving it a sniff. “I wish I had a mass spectrometer handy.”

“There’s nothing _handy_ about a mass spectrometer!” he sputtered.

“Want to bet?”

Meanwhile, the Doctor was trying to get as much information out of the foreman as possible, which had included the name ‘Lord Sutcliffe’ and that the material was the waste byproduct of the strange bioluminescent creature under the ice… and that it apparently burned a thousand times hotter than coal (probably not an exact figure, she reasoned).

“They say it even burns under water,” the foreman said.

Jenny tried not to audibly squee. “Jones, do you have a lighter?” she whispered to Harry.

“I’m not lending you anything until you’ve washed your hands,” he hissed back.

The Doctor, however, was already on his way out of the workhouse.

Jenny’s own departure was delayed by Harry dragging her over to a water pump.

“So Sutcliffe owns a bunch of steel mills that he’s powering with some sort of superfuel from that creature,” Jenny wondered out loud as they caught up. “If it burns as hot as they claimed, that’s far more than they need for processing steel.”

“We don’t know for sure that it _is_ steel,” Harry pointed out. “Could be anything. Could be alien: something that hot could work as a kind of rocket fuel.”

“I assume that’s where we’re heading next?” Jenny asked.

The Doctor shook his head. “Not yet. First, let’s pay Lord Sutcliffe a visit. If we’re going to stop him, we need to know what he really is.”

“You think he’s an alien too?”

“Never hurts to check,” he replied grimly.

“So, what, you’ll just know? Is there like a test or something?”

“I’ll figure it out when we get there. Leave the talking to me.”

“Why can’t we help?” Jenny asked.

“Because you are two of the rudest people I’ve ever met.”

“Oi!” Jenny protested.

Harry made a similarly offended noise. “Her, maybe. I can be charming when I need to be.”

The Doctor remained unconvinced. “If you talk, then she talks, and then neither of you stop,” he said. “You’re about to meet a man, alien or otherwise, for whom human beings are raw material, who feeds children to animals for profit. What we are here for is one thing: information. We get that with diplomacy and tact. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘me.’ Understand?”

“Fine,” they both grumbled.

When they arrived at Sutcliffe’s front door, Harry gave Jenny a look of irritation. “Your hair is starting to fall down,” he said.

Back on the TARDIS, he had badgered her into pinning it up (“your trousers are going to draw enough attention as it is,” he complained), but she was fairly certain that she had botched it in some way. Hairstyles weren’t something that she had ever been interested in, and therefore she hadn’t bothered to learn how to do them.

_But does he have to be so smug about it?_

“Turn around,” Harry ordered with a sigh. 

_And_ _bossy_ _?_

“How do you know anything about nineteenth-century updos?” she asked as he started fussing with her hair.

“Because I’m a very cultured individual with hidden depths,” he replied.

“Watch a lot of costume dramas, do you?”

 _“Anyone_ with a hint of common sense would know that you need more than two pins to keep your hair in place. Now hold still.”

The Doctor, meanwhile, was watching the whole thing in bemused silence.

“There,” Harry said after a few minutes and several instances of poking her in the scalp with a hairpin. “And don’t go touching it.”

In lieu of thanks, Jenny merely rolled her eyes.

The Doctor flashed his billfold at the doorman, and they were admitted to the manor’s drawing room.

“What is that thing?” Jenny asked. 

“Psychic paper,” the Doctor said, “and no, you can’t take a closer look at it.” He tucked it back into his coat. “Now sit down, both of you.”

A well-dressed man in a vivid blue coat entered the drawing room and greeted the Doctor enthusiastically. “Doctor Disco, from the Fairford Club!”

Jenny couldn’t help sneaking a glance at Harry, who was struggling to keep a straight face. “Doctor _Disco?”_ she mouthed at him. In spite of his apparent best efforts, he emitted a snort of laughter.

It was enough to get Sutcliffe’s attention, which turned out to not be a positive thing. 

“Who let this foreign _trash_ in here?” he demanded, sneering at Harry. “On your feet, boy, in the presence of your betters.”

Before Harry could respond, however, Lord Sutcliffe was knocked to the floor after being on the receiving end of a punch from a fist that Jenny only now realised was her own.

She didn’t even remember standing up.

“Well,” she said with a nervous smile at the Doctor, “I didn’t _say_ anything.”

The Doctor glared at her. “Charm. Tact. _Diplomacy,”_ he growled. “Not _punching.”_

“Oh, come off it,” Jenny retorted. “Your hands are _still_ clenched in fists. I just beat you to it.”

As the Doctor knelt down to examine the unconscious Sutcliffe, Jenny turned back to face Harry. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’ve heard worse,” he said with an attempt at a casual shrug. “I guess you don’t need a hammer to cause havoc.”

“I might stick with the hammer from now on,” she admitted with a wince. “I think I just popped something in my hand.”

“He’s human,” the Doctor concluded, getting to his feet.

“Then let’s head to the mills,” Jenny suggested. 

“I think we might have hit a slight snag with that part of the plan,” Harry said as he stood up. 

Jenny turned to find several very physically imposing and _very_ cross men entering the room.

“Oh, that’s not good,” she said.

* * *

“So let’s review,” Harry said drily, struggling with the knots that bound his wrists behind his back, “we’re about to either drown or become very valuable space whale excrement. _Fantastic.”_

“Probably both,” Jenny pointed out.

“Well, you’re just a _ray_ of sunshine, aren’t you?”

“You started it! I don’t suppose your ‘hidden depths’ happen to include escape artistry?”

“Even if it did, it isn’t as though you’d appreciate it,” he snapped.

“I’m amazed that the two of you aren’t loud enough to be heard over the noise of the crowd,” the Doctor muttered.

To Harry’s surprise, he found the fact that the Doctor also sounded sarcastic to be a little encouraging. The three of them were tied up and stashed in a tent on the ice, while Sutcliffe and his thugs prepared to detonate enough explosives to break up the frozen surface of the river and send all of the attendees of the Frost Fair splashing into the Thames as food for the beast living below.

But if the Doctor was being sarcastic, it meant there was a chance that they weren’t doomed. 

“Is there something nearby we could use to cut the ropes?” Jenny asked, looking around as best she could despite her own restraints.

“I already checked,” Harry groaned. 

“Yes, but I don’t trust you to not have missed something,” she retorted.

“I have a solution for the ropes,” the Doctor interjected wearily. “My sonic screwdriver is in my inside jacket pocket. Can you reach it, Jones?”

Harry, who was sitting between Jenny and the Doctor, managed to contort himself enough to get the item out of the pocket, but then lost his grip on it. The screwdriver clattered to the ice.

“I’ve got it,” Jenny said, scooting over and grabbing it with her tied-up hands. “How does it work?”

“Just hand it to me,” the Doctor ordered.

“You’ve got enough psychic tech that I assume this’ll work the same way,” she said, ignoring him. “Point and think, yeah?”

“Assuming you’re thinking again and not just decking the next person to piss you off,” Harry grumbled. Though he wouldn’t have admitted it out loud, he was feeling a bit jealous that he didn’t get the chance to try the device out himself.

A high-pitched whirr filled the air and Jenny brought her hands out from behind her back, shaking off the untied piece of rope. “Ooo, that was fun!” She pointed the screwdriver at Harry and scrunched up her face in concentration.

“You’re going to pull a muscle if you do that,” Harry remarked, but grinned once he felt the knots loosen.

She did the same for the Doctor, who promptly snatched it out of her hand. “I didn’t think it would be that easy,” Jenny confessed, still staring longingly at the piece of technology.

“Neither did I,” the Doctor murmured with an uneasy expression on his face. “Let’s go; we need to get everyone off the ice.”

“Hang on,” Harry said, looking down at the ice, where little green lights had begun to gather under Jenny’s feet. “The fish are back.”

“Of course,” the Doctor said, eyes widening as an idea occurred to him. “It’s the _sound._ That’s how they choose the next victim: they’re attracted to the noise of someone obviously isolated.”

“In that case, can we move so that it’s not me?” Jenny asked, gazing at the fish a little nervously.

“What do we do now?” Harry asked the Doctor. “Sutcliffe planted a lot of explosives around. He could detonate them before we managed to get everyone on shore.”

Jenny’s eyes lit up. “What if we moved the explosives?”

“We can’t get them away from the crowds in time.”

“Not horizontally,” she said. “Vertically: we drop the barrels under the ice, right where the creature is.”

Harry frowned. “We kill it?”

“What choice do we have?” Jenny countered. “Even if we get everyone off the ice, it might break its chains and attack people.” She sighed. “I thought _you_ were the realist, not me.”

“Maybe I’m more idealistic than I realised.” He turned to the Doctor. “What do you think?”

The Doctor shook his head. “It can’t be up to me.”

“You get a say in this too.”

“No, I don’t. Your people, _your_ planet. I serve at the pleasure of the human race, and right now, that’s you.”

“Harry, come on,” Jenny said softly. “We’re running out of time.”

But he kept his eyes fixed on the ice and what lay below. He thought about that massive creature, bound up in chains. He remembered what they heard when the Doctor went below the ice hours ago… and faintly, despite the noise of the crowds, he could still sense it: that low moaning of despair that resonated in his very bones.

“Can’t you hear it?” Harry asked. “It’s in pain.”

“That doesn’t make it harmless.”

“It’s waterbound and the ice was due to break anyway. Let’s give it a chance, at least.”

He and Jenny locked eyes for a brief moment. “Jenny… _please,”_ he whispered.

After another moment, she nodded. “All right. We try to save it.” She turned back to the Doctor. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”

The Doctor actually _laughed._ “I have, in fact.” His expression grew serious again. “You get everyone off the ice. I’ll take care of this.”

* * *

All hell broke loose and Jenny nearly fell into the river, but their gamble had paid off: everyone made it back to shore before Sutcliffe used the detonator… except for Sutcliffe himself. When he went to examine the explosives when they failed to go off, he discovered that the Doctor had moved them under the ice, not next to the creature itself but to where the chains were holding it in place. 

To be fair, they _had_ warned everyone to get off the ice… and Sutcliffe _did_ technically count as part of ‘everyone.’ He just hadn’t listened.

From the bridge, Jenny could see the creature breach the surface of the water as it swam out to sea.

“It’s singing,” Harry murmured from beside her.

“It’s lovely,” she agreed. “Doesn’t sound sad anymore, does it?”

His eyes still fixed on the water, Harry smiled in a way that Jenny hadn’t seen before.

_It’s a nice smile, when he’s not doing that awful smirking thing._

She laughed ruefully. “I hate admitting this,” she said, “but you were right. All it needed was a chance.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You never say I’m right.”

Jenny gave him a light smack on the arm. “Don’t let it go to your head, okay?”

“I make no such promises.”

“Not that you were smarter, of course. It’s just…” She could feel herself blushing. “That was surprisingly sweet, what you did.”

“I can be sweet when I want to be.” He smirked. “Just not with you.”

She rolled her eyes. “If the Doctor comes round, tell him I’ve gone down to the banks to get a sample from the pieces of ice.”

Harry briefly looked like he wanted to say something more, but instead turned his gaze back out towards the water and the retreating figure of the most improbable thing they had done that day.

Well, Jenny thought, flexing the sore fingers on her right hand, maybe not the _most_ improbable thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaa thank you for reading! I have been blown away by the reaction this story has gotten so far. Thank you all so much!
> 
> I have nine billion little bits of headcanon that I wasn't able to work into this fic, so if anyone has questions about what these two Disaster Nerds are up to, feel free to ask them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.
> 
> My city has been under a "stay-at-home" order for the last two weeks and I was voluntarily working from home for a week prior to that. AO3 has been a great source of distraction in a pretty anxiety-inducing time, so I wanted to do my best to provide a little bit of distraction for everyone else.
> 
> Stay safe, fam! <3


	5. Trips No. 6 & 7: Bristol to Chasm Forge Mining Station (and Back Again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Series 10, Episode 5: “Oxygen”

“—and what _I’m_ saying is that it’s a bit sociopathic, that’s all.”

“It’s just a thought exercise,” Harry said, annoyed. “Besides, it isn’t all that different from what you study: how to change the output by altering the input. Like your little ice sculpture project—”

“Which has actual utility!”

“So does this!”

“What happened to ‘it’s just a thought experiment’?” Jenny asked, with that smirk she typically got when she believed she had backed him into a rhetorical corner.

“It’s for _restaurants,_ it’s not a matter of life and death!”

“Don’t you want to make the world _better?_ What’s the point of being clever if you only use it to extract profit from people?”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “Did you just call me clever?”

“By a certain standard,” she said airily. “If I was grading on a curve.”

“Eh, I’ll take what I can get.”

Her expression hardened again. “Which is exactly the thing that’s wrong with you: taking whatever you can get.”

He emitted a growl of frustration. “Smith, you are overreacting to an almost frightening extent. Why are you taking this so seriously?”

“Because all it does is remind me of Sutcliffe!” she snapped. “Not that you’re feeding children to a chained-up creature, but it’s the same sort of mindset that leads to things like that!”

He was beginning to get upset as well. “If you’ll recall, _I_ was the one who wanted to set it free when _you_ were dead set on killing it.”

For a moment, her eyes flashed with genuine anger, but instead of giving voice to it she quickened her pace down the hall leading to the Doctor’s office.

If the Doctor hadn’t specifically requested that they both come, Harry would have just turned around and gone home. After the incident at the Frost Fair, they had almost reached something that resembled ‘getting along,’ only to devolve back into animosity less than a fortnight later after he had made some off-handed remark about her tendency to solve problems through violence, which Jenny had taken badly enough that she actually avoided him after lectures instead of staying to argue with him.

Before they went on their first trip in the TARDIS, Harry would have been pleased to finally have some peace and quiet, but in truth he actually missed the arguments. It was also a depressing reminder that he didn’t really have anyone else in his life to talk to, other than the cashiers at SPAR when he went shopping.

By the time he caught up with Jenny, she was already inside the office, and the Doctor was going back and forth between the inside of the TARDIS and the outside. He looked… well, ‘upbeat’ might have been taking it a bit far, but at least the Doctor didn’t look irritated, which seemed to be his default eyebrow setting.

“Are you taking another trip?” Jenny asked.

“We,” the Doctor corrected her.

Harry blinked in surprise. “You’re inviting us to come along?”

“What’s the point of visiting somewhere exciting if you don’t have someone to go _‘ooo, that’s quite exciting!’_ while you stand there and gawk at a thing?” The Doctor pulled a box out from under his desk and hauled it into the TARDIS.

“I thought that you weren’t keen on being a tour guide,” Jenny reminded him. “Do you need a hand with anything, by the way?”

“Yes,” the Doctor answered, pointing inside the control room. “Move that box out into the office.”

Confused, she wrinkled her nose. “The one you just carried in there?”

“That’s the one.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like the look of it,” he said. “And I don’t like being _told_ to be a tour guide—”

“We _asked_ last time,” Jenny said, attempting to pick up the box and struggling a little with it. “What have you got in here, iron bars?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”

“There is _never_ going to be a question that she doesn’t want the answer to,” Harry remarked, heading over to help her. After a brief glare, she reluctantly allowed him to help her carry the box out of the TARDIS.

“Yes, you asked, technically,” the Doctor continued, “but you did the little face scrunching thing when you asked and that counts as cheating.”

“What _‘face scrunching’_ thing?” Jenny demanded.

Harry stifled a laugh. “You’re doing it right now,” he said as they set the box back on the floor of the office.

Some very treacherous part of his mind quietly noted that it was a rather cute expression.

_Oh no you don’t._

“All right,” Harry said, while Jenny continued to look offended, “where are we going this time?”

“Space!” the Doctor proclaimed.

“That narrows it down very little,” Jenny pointed out, moving as far away from Harry as possible. “Like… zero-point-zero-zero-zero—”

 _“Where_ in space?” Harry interjected.

“Pick a spot!” The Doctor was staring at the box they had just carried out in a way that implied he was reconsidering its current position. “Ideally somewhere a bit underdeveloped. You see,” he said, his voice transitioning into Full Lecture Mode, “going to space is like camping. Too much between you and the outside and you might as well stay home. To really feel it, you need the space equivalent of a wafer-thin sleeping bag and a leaky two-man tent. So pick a campsite.”

“It’s like _camping?”_ Harry still felt a few seconds behind what was going on. 

Before the Doctor could answer, however, Jenny interrupted from where she was standing at the door to the TARDIS. “Is that alarm supposed to be going off?”

The Doctor’s face lit up with a delighted grin. “That’s my theme tune—otherwise known as a distress call.”

“A distress call from where?” Harry wasn’t sure if he was more nervous about the distress call or the Doctor’s reaction to it.

“From where we’re heading next, of course. Now into the TARDIS, everyone, before Nardole gets back from Birmingham.”

“What was he doing in Birmingham?” Jenny asked.

“I sent him to buy crisps.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted him in Birmingham and I wanted crisps. Win-win.”

Given the frantic pace of the conversation ever since he and Jenny set foot in the office, Harry was beginning to suspect that the Doctor had been experiencing the time-traveller’s equivalent of cabin fever.

Although, if it meant that he got to come along on a trip through space and time, Harry certainly didn’t mind.

“Oh drat,” Jenny muttered as the Doctor busied himself with piloting the TARDIS.

“What is it?” Harry asked.

“Now I’m just hungry for crisps. Is that weird?”

The fact that she was talking to him again caused Harry to feel more relieved than he expected. “More like a sign that you should have eaten before coming here.” 

“I hope wherever we end up has a cafeteria or something.”

* * *

Not only did the Chasm Forge Mining Station not have a cafeteria, it didn’t even have _air._

“This whole place is a capitalist nightmare,” Jenny grumbled. “Extra surcharges, even for the oxygen.” 

With every step she took, several different trains of thought went racing through her head:

First, she only had a limited number of breaths remaining in her so-called ‘Smartsuit’… in fact, her brain kept very helpfully reminding her _exactly_ how many were left.

Of the original forty members of the station’s crew, only four—wait, three, there were only three now—were still alive, and the remaining thirty-six—thirty-seven—were now corpses in spacesuits that had been programmed to kill everyone because they weren’t _profitable enough_ to be kept alive.

(There was also a train of thought that kept trying to find an excuse to be angry at Harry about this, and she wasn’t even entirely sure _why_ she was angry with him in the first place, but it was a train that had very much jumped its rails.)

And the suit _she_ was wearing was an absolute piece of—

“Smith!” the Doctor shouted at her. “Helmets on! We’re heading out the airlock!”

“Oh, brilliant,” she muttered. The group of what she adamantly refused to call ‘zombies’ had blocked their initial escape route to the station’s core, meaning that they had to find an alternate way to get there: going outside the station to an access point for another section of the ship.

“Too bad these forcefields aren’t strong enough to protect us from the vacuum as well,” Harry said, handing Jenny her helmet. “We’d at least get to keep our peripheral vision, which would come in handy given the murderous robot suits chasing after us—oh, sorry,” he interrupted with a smirk, “should I say robot _interfaces?”_

She glared at him. “You shouldn’t, because they aren’t, _and_ because this is an absolutely awful time to joke about anything.” Well, at least now she could be irritated with him properly. “Especially about one of the previous times we nearly died.”

“Yeah: _nearly_ died,” Harry pointed out. “So why can’t this be another _nearly_ one as well?”

“Past performance is not indicative of future results,” she retorted. “I would have thought you’d remember that.”

His expression darkened and he muttered something, but the sound of her helmet sealing to her suit kept Jenny from making out the words.

Something was nagging at her, something she was missing, something she had seen out of the corner of her eye but hadn’t caught up with the tangled snarl of thoughts still rampaging around her mind—

An alert lit up on the airlock: decompression would occur in forty seconds… thirty-nine…

_Great, another thing I get to count down…_

There was something she had noticed without realising… something else that was reminding her of what she had forgotten…

Was it one of the crew member’s words from earlier? _‘Forty breaths to the dorms. One-twenty to the core.’_ Everything on the station was measured by the number of breaths it would take to travel there.

_Something about the breaths… the number of breaths…_

She heard a noise through her helmet’s communication channel.

_Something about counting down…_

It was Harry.

She could hear him breathing… no.

He was very faintly wheezing.

“Jones,” she asked, “how many breaths do you have left?”

“One hundred-fifty,” he replied quickly. “I’m fine. Ivan said only forty breaths to the core from here.”

“He didn’t account for the steps outside,” she said. 

“It’s not much more than that.”

She could feel a chill moving over her skin. “Back when we put on the suits, yours had more breaths remaining than mine.” That was what she had missed, what she had seen before but hadn’t put together until this moment: the number of breaths on his suit’s indicator. “Now you have less.” A _lot_ less.

“I said I’m _fine,_ Smith,” he snapped. That faint wheeze was still there.

Jenny stepped to the side and got a look at the oxygen tank on his lower back. “Your tank is damaged. You’ve been slowly leaking air this whole time.”

“I can worry about it later,” Harry insisted. “The airlock’s opening.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” she demanded. That chill was still here, still crawling all over her and seeping into her bones. “At the rate it’s leaking, you might not make it in time!”

“What good would it have done? There weren’t any more tanks or suits available, were there?”

She inhaled sharply (still conscious of how many breaths she had left). “There’s _loads_ of oxygen tanks,” she realised. “The other suits… the ones with the corpses in them… they don’t need their tanks, do they?” She clenched her teeth, which were starting to chatter for some reason. “If you had said something before, we could have—”

“Smith,” Harry interrupted.

“We could have tried to get one, we—”

“Jenny!” he shouted. “There’s a warning light on your suit!”

She turned her focus back to her own Smartsuit: an alarm was going off, but with the suit’s vocal interface disabled, Jenny couldn’t tell what the problem actually was.

But it didn’t matter: the chamber finished decompressing and they were exposed to the vacuum of space.

They started walking across the hull in the direction of the airlock that was a relatively short distance away but felt like miles at the moment. Had it been in less perilous circumstances, Jenny would have found the experience of being out in space to be thrilling.

Next to her, Harry was stumbling slightly. “Well,” he grumbled, “now I know why my suit was in for repairs: one of the magnets in the boots keeps going out every few steps.”

“Hang on to me,” Jenny said, grabbing the fabric of his sleeve. “At least this way you won’t go wheeling off into space.”

“Hurry,” the Doctor called, “they’re right behind us.”

Harry shifted his arm and took her hand in his. Jenny gave it a faint squeeze through the gloves. She was still a bit angry with him, but this time it was an anger born of worry rather than resentment or irritation.

The warning lights kept flashing, finally accompanied by a sound that explained both the alarms and the reason why she had felt so chilly.

“Something’s wrong with my helmet,” she said, unsure of whether her voice was trembling from the cold or from fear.

“What is it?” The Doctor joined Harry at her side.

“Look,” Harry pointed to a spot on the transparent material.

“It’s fracturing,” Jenny said. Tiny cracks spiderwebbed across the surface of her helmet. “That’s what the suit was warning me about.”

The Doctor reached for the spot where his jacket pocket would have been were he not in a spacesuit, but even if he _had_ somehow been able to access it, it didn’t matter because his sonic screwdriver had been crushed by one of the first deadly suits they encountered after they arrived. And even _then,_ the screwdriver was actually in Jenny’s own pocket, because she managed to snatch up the pieces before the Doctor could reach them.

The structural integrity of materials was one of her areas of interest—discovering just how much pressure something could endure before snapping—and her mind automatically went to work calculating how much time she had left.

Not enough to make it to the airlock, but enough to do the other thing she wanted to do.

The hand that wasn’t in Harry’s went to the oxygen tank on her back and released the switch holding it in place.

“What are you—” Harry cried out, but couldn’t do anything further as she pulled the damaged tank out of his own suit and snapped hers in its place.

“At least one of us will get that _‘nearly’_ you were talking about,” she said, and gave him a shove hard enough to rip his one working magnetized boot from the surface of the hull and send him floating towards the airlock ahead of them. “Goodbye, Harry Jones.”

There was a single moment, right before her helmet shattered, when she could hear him screaming her name.

_“Jenny!”_

And then there was nothing at all.

* * *

With every second that passed, the more things Harry noticed were working in his favour:

First, the zombified Smartsuits weren’t more durable than any other kind of protective garment.

Second, they could only deliver a lethal electric shock by transmitting the order to another Smartsuit.

Third, the order could only be transmitted by direct touch.

Fourth, there was a piece of equipment just inside the airlock that was little more than a rubber-insulated spear.

And fifth, he was _extremely angry and terrified_ and therefore desperately needed the kind of catharsis that impaling a person-sized figure with a pointy stick could provide.

Before he fully understood half of what he was doing, Harry pinned the rogue Smartsuit to the wall and yanked the oxygen tank out of its back.

The Doctor had been hurried to the next section for the closest thing to first aid the crew could muster, but Jenny was still unconscious on the deck with the Doctor’s helmet over her head. 

Harry would have been angry that she had been left here if not for the fact that a) the Doctor had just spent over a minute exposed to vacuum and it was a bloody miracle that his lungs hadn’t exploded in the process, b) common sense triage dictated that the Doctor needed help first, as it took less time to die of exposure than from lack of oxygen, and c) Harry had yelled both of the previous points at the crew several times until they agreed.

Frantically, Harry snapped the tank of oxygen onto her suit. 

_Only a minute, it was only a minute, the Doctor got the helmet on her before anything really happened, even though she didn’t have an oxygen tank it was only a minute without air, maybe two…_

Now that they were back inside the station, the helmet was no longer necessary, so he pulled his off as well as hers. Kneeling beside her, his heart started racing to the rhythm of a silent plea: _Come on Jenny, wake up, please, just wake up, Jenny, just wake up…_

The suit was too bulky for him to tell if she had started breathing again, and the air forcefield over her face kept him from knowing if the oxygen was doing anything at all.

_Come on, please, wake up, Jenny, open your eyes and look at me, I forgot what colour your eyes were so please just open them and let me know that you’re fine, you can be mad at me if you want to be mad, I would be okay with that, but just wake up, Jenny, please just wake up—_

“I’m up, I’m up,” she said faintly.

Harry couldn’t help starting a little: he didn’t think he had said all that out loud.

Apparently he had.

“You’re late for class,” he said with what was meant to be a laugh, but he felt like his throat had closed up.

“And you’re a rubbish alarm clock.” Jenny blinked a few times and looked at their surroundings. “My helmet exploded,” she said, her face doing that scrunching thing that it did when she was confused. “How am I still here?”

“The Doctor gave you his and got you to safety,” Harry explained. Jenny’s eyes widened, so he hastened to add, “He’s alive! They’re treating him over in another section.”

“Alien physiology has its advantages.” Jenny sat up and winced. “Ooo, that was a rough one. Where did the oxygen come from?”

Harry gestured to the suit on the wall that was now a new piece of conceptual art.

She snorted. “Well, looks like you don’t have any grounds to accuse me of—” But she was cut off as Harry grabbed her in a fierce hug. 

“Don’t you ever do that again,” he whispered into her shoulder. “Don’t you _ever_ try to sacrifice yourself for me like that again, _ever,_ do you hear me?”

“My suit was breaking down,” Jenny said quietly. “I thought at least I’d die quickly, which was better than you slowly gasping yourself to death.” Her voice grew angry. “Why didn’t you ask for help?” she demanded.

“Because there were more important things happening!”

“More important than your _life?”_

Harry released her from the hug and sat back on his heels. “Well, apparently we’re both terrible at keeping _ourselves_ alive, so it’s a good thing that we worry about each other enough to compensate!”

He had no idea if he was angry or scared or relieved, only that his heart was still racing and he couldn’t look away from her face. Distantly, his mind registered that she was staring at him with a similar level of intensity.

“They’re hazel,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Your eyes. I couldn’t remember what colour they were and…” They were both probably wasting obscene amounts of air just sitting there, but all he could think of was Jenny’s eyes and the way that her lips were parted ever so slightly.

They both leaned in at the same time—

And right before their lips met, there was a _zap!_ as their forcefields touched.

Harry swore as he jerked away. Jenny looked more startled than anything else. “I…” he tried to say, but Jenny was already standing up.

“We need to find the Doctor,” she said, obviously trying not to meet his eyes. “Where—”

She froze, staring at something behind Harry, and as he turned he realised what it was:

The suits were out in the hallway, shuffling back and forth like a sleepwalker searching for something in a dream.

“Why aren’t they coming in here?” she whispered urgently.

“Ivan said that this area is too new to be in their mapping systems. To the suits, it’s like it doesn’t exist.” Their presence was still extremely creepy, though; Harry had to fight to keep his breathing steady. “But now we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

“They’re between us and the Doctor, aren’t they?”

He nodded. “He and the others are in Section Twelve.”

In eerie synchronicity, the suits began to move in a single direction.

“Let me guess,” Jenny said, her voice shaking slightly. “Section Twelve _is_ in the mapping system?”

Harry bit back a torrent of profanity. “And now they’re heading that way.”

“And we only have one pointy stick between us,” she noted, then frowned. “That’s a bit strange, actually.”

“The pointy stick?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not that. They were able to listen in… make inferences, be creative… they must be continually receiving orders. Oh!” she exclaimed, eyes going wide. “That means they could be reasoned with!”

“Or possibly charmed,” Harry mused, getting to his feet, “if we found a way to convince them to let us go.”

“You’re on your own for that one,” Jenny replied. “My charm relies rather heavily on a vicious right hook.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so _now_ you’re all right with joking about it.”

“It’s all in the timing. Speaking of time, we’re running low on that, so let’s start thinking up a plan. Race you to the best argument!”

Harry wracked his brain and considered his options.

_How does one debate a corporate entity?_

He could theoretically point out that the two of them weren’t even part of the crew and therefore should be exempt from the termination order, but decided against it. Not because he wasn’t sure that the argument would work (there was probably even more reason to kill them seeing as they were wasting additional resources on non-corporate assets) but because, even though he was desperate to save himself and Jenny, he wasn’t so desperate that he would sell out other people in his place.

(It didn’t stop a nasty voice in the back of his mind from suggesting it, though: _They’re not important…_ _you’re_ _important… why risk your life for them?)_

But what was the point of being clever if he couldn’t use it to make things better?

He’d discovered the truth about the colonists in stasis and realised that the creature in the Thames was in pain… he knew how to help people and was clever enough to figure out a third option.

So what was the third option in this case?

_Think!_

“Wait, wait, wait… wait a minute…” he whispered to himself. 

Something Jenny had said, back before the airlock opened… something she had noticed… something that was reminding him of what he had forgotten…

_‘The other suits… the ones with the corpses in them… they don’t need their tanks, do they?’_

_Oh!_

He dashed into the hallway and addressed the group. “Hello Smartsuits! Are you lot listening in?” he shouted cheerfully. “You’re receiving those murderous orders from above, so I suppose you’d qualify as corporate representatives, wouldn’t you?”

The suits stopped their slow shuffling and turned to face him.

“And, _wow,_ what a corporation!” he exclaimed. “Efficient, unsentimental, a wee bit sociopathic…” He grinned and gave them a wink. “I can relate to that. But this station has become something of a sticky wicket for you, hasn’t it? All those organic components eating into your profit margins.” He shook his head. “Shameful. How are you going to salvage this one before the quarterly financials are due? Well, hang onto your hats—helmets, I suppose—because if you want to maximize profit…” His smile widened. “I can facilitate that. Think of me as a consultant—pro bono, of course. Ready? I hope someone’s taking notes, because I’m not going to repeat myself. Time is money, after all.”

The suits had gone perfectly still. Well, apparently _something_ he said had made an impact.

Harry breathed a small sigh of relief and continued. “If this mining operation is so unprofitable that keeping its crew alive was detrimental to the bottom line, then even a fully automated replacement crew wouldn’t be enough to turn a profit. Cheapest option is to shut the station down entirely and dismantle it for parts. Sell off every last bit of it… ooo, wait a minute.” He held up a finger as if to silence any replies. “You forgot about the oxygen tanks. Without a living crew, they’re useless. Inventory that can’t be sold. Wasted resources.”

“So!” He spread his arms, hoping like hell that something vaguely intelligent was listening. “Best thing to do with all of those spare tanks is to pass them along to the rest of the old crew and let them leave so that you can get on with taking the station apart. Those tanks are a sunk cost: you can’t combine them or resell them—and that’s by design, right? They’re just trash, taking up space. The remaining organic crew can take that trash out themselves and save you the trouble. We’ve even got a free transport for them, won’t cost the company a dime. So what do you say? Have we got a deal?”

During the ensuing silence, Harry saw his entire life pass before his eyes. Most of it was profoundly uninteresting… at least the bits that happened before he met Jenny.

It was almost like his life hadn’t been real until that point.

Then, still in that unsettling unison, the suits removed their oxygen tanks.

“Fantastic,” he said approvingly. “Just place them on the ground and we’ll take it from here. Save your batteries till we’ve gone on our merry way.” He grabbed a few of the tanks and beckoned to Jenny. “Come on.”

As they ran through and past the group of now immobile suits, Jenny shook her head in amazement. “That was…”

“Brilliant?”

“More like _daft._ You’re lucky that they’re not as good as I am at picking apart your arguments. I caught at least three logical fallacies in there, and I’m still disoriented from oxygen deprivation. Imagine what I’ll be able to do when we get out of here.”

Harry felt his cheeks warm as he discovered that he could imagine all _sorts_ of things that the two of them might get up to once they were out of there.

When they reached Section Twelve, the Doctor was already standing, grinning like he had just pulled off the heist of the century.

“The suits stood down!” Harry announced, passing out the extra oxygen. “We can make it back to the TARDIS now.”

“How are you feeling?” Jenny asked the Doctor, then started in surprise as she got a look at his face. “What happened to your eyes?”

Harry winced as he saw the milky white film covering the Doctor’s pupils.

The Doctor waved her off. “Just a little side effect of that spacewalk. I’ll be fine once we return to St. Luke’s: I’ve got some stuff in my office that’ll cure anything. Failing that, I think I’ve got some spare eyes somewhere. They’re from a lizard, but I’m sure they’ll fit.”

“Doctor,” Jenny said hesitantly. “I… I mean, thank you. You saved my life.”

He looked vaguely nauseous. “Well, now you’ve made it awkward. Start walking.”

“Do you need a hand?” Harry asked.

The Doctor gestured in what he probably thought was the direction of Abby, Ivan, and Dahh-Ren, the surviving crew members. “I’ve been ordering these three around all day. You two can give directions.”

As they made their way back to the TARDIS, Harry recounted what had happened: “I convinced the suits that it would be more profitable to let us leave with the oxygen tanks. You should have been there, Doctor: it was a brilliant piece of oratory.”

“I’m sure it was,” the Doctor said drily, “but I think it’s more likely that they stood down because I wired our life signs into the coolant system, so that if we died the station’s core would explode. When one of the suits wandered over, I let them know that we were now too _expensive_ to kill.”

Harry’s shoulders slumped. “Oh.”

“It wasn’t a bad speech,” Jenny said, looking sympathetic. The corners of her mouth twitched in a smile. “Bit sociopathic, though.”

He shrugged. “If you want to fight a sociopath, sometimes you’ve got to think like one.”

“I’d hate to see what you’d be like if you were _trying_ to be evil.”

“You’d love it. I’d make an _amazing_ villain.”

They made it inside the TARDIS without incident. Harry hadn’t realised what a difference it would make to no longer have a forcefield around his head keeping the oxygen in, until he took off the suit and found that he could breathe freely.

“There’s a wardrobe in here if you need a change of clothes,” the Doctor told the crew. “I can smell you all from here, so I imagine that you’ve been fear-sweating into those suits for days.”

“First door on the left, second right, under the stairs, past the bins, fifth door on the left,” Jenny directed them.

Harry raised his eyebrows. “I can’t believe you remembered all that.”

“I’m not _that_ disoriented from lack of air,” she said with a smirk.

“I’m not sure I’d be able to tell,” he deadpanned. “The way you move is so uncoordinated that for all I know you’ve been under-oxygenated for years.”

Still smirking, Jenny leaned in so that they could talk more quietly. “Well, now you have some data for a comparison, don’t you?”

“If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d say you did all that on purpose just for analysis’ sake.”

“Trust me, if that was the case I’d be far angrier at you for saving me.”

 _“Are_ you angry at me?” Harry asked hesitantly, suddenly aware of how near they were to one another.

Her smirk morphed into a genuine smile. “You did ruin my moment of heroism, after all.”

He laughed. “Well, I wasn’t about to let you get the last word in, was I?” She was so close, he wondered what would happen if he just—

“Cut that out, you two, and get over here,” the Doctor snapped. “I need a few extra hands to pilot the TARDIS.” He exhaled in frustration. “Never thought I’d say this, but it would have been convenient to have Nardole here. He knows enough to have dropped the crew off on the way. Ah well,” he sighed. “I’ll take them back after I get patched up.”

“So how do we set the coordinates?” Jenny asked as they reached the console.

“You don’t. That sort of thing takes a lot more finesse than either of you could manage on a first try.”

It was probably a good thing that the Doctor couldn’t see at the moment, because the expression on Jenny’s face bordered on lethal. “So then what _do_ you want us to do?” she demanded. “Turn on the air conditioning?”

“The TARDIS always saves its most recent point of origin,” he explained, sounding obviously amused, “so activating the fast-return will take us back to Bristol. Smith, there’s a bank of switches on the side opposite me; flip the first, third, and fourth ones. Jones, head to the part of the console just to Smith’s left and enter the following digits on the keypad…”

It really didn’t seem all _that_ difficult to operate a TARDIS, Harry reflected as the Doctor continued to direct them through the process. There was a bizarre logic to it, one that he could almost comprehend if he just had a little more time to figure it out. 

Jenny was apparently having similar thoughts. “Once we’re done with all this, could you give us lessons?” she asked.

The Doctor snorted. “There’s only one person who gets to fly this TARDIS, and it’s me.”

“You just said Nardole knew how to pilot it!”

“How about this, then: I don’t want the two of you nicking my motor the next time my back is turned. Now pull the big lever and let’s go.”

* * *

Even with her back turned, Jenny could feel Harry watching her. 

She wanted to tell him to find something else to stare at, but she worried that if she turned around to face him she would forget what to say.

The adrenaline from the mining station was wearing off—as well as the strange giddiness that came along with it—and in its place was mostly confusion.

She could still feel the echo of his arms around her and couldn’t understand why it didn’t bother her.

Jenny didn’t like people touching her. She never had, in fact, although the memories of her life before coming to St. Luke’s were so dull that they weren’t worth thinking about. Unless she had no other choice, she needed as much personal space as she could get.

Then why did she feel this ache under her skin at the thought of Harry touching her again?

The narrow escapes, having to dance for their lives, pulling one another out of danger, running hand in hand, and even the first time they had discovered the TARDIS, when Jenny had practically climbed on top of him in her excitement to see what was beyond the locked door… none of those touches bothered her.

And now they had almost _kissed,_ which would have been easy enough to attribute to the aftereffects of their brush with death, except for the fact that she knew that once they were back at St. Luke’s, Harry would ask her a question that she very much wanted to say yes to:

_Will you come with me?_

She knew that there were plenty of people out there who would have enjoyed the diversion of a casual fling, and perhaps if it were someone different she might have even considered it, but not in this case.

Not with him. With Harry, there wasn’t the option of being casual. Anything between them would have to be all or nothing: the pettiest of rivals, the closest of friends, the bitterest of enemies, the dearest of—

There was nothing casual about that.

And if she didn’t stop this now, there would be no way out for either of them.

Nardole met them in the Doctor’s office with a packet of crisps and a very stern lecture for the Doctor.

“You took an _oath!”_ Nardole sputtered, clearly unsure if he should be fussing over the Doctor for being injured or giving him a good smack for putting himself in danger to begin with. “What if you got killed out there, huh? What happens to your precious Earth then? You need to be here, you _know_ what’s at stake!”

“Stop your tantrum and come along,” the Doctor said to him, obviously cross. “I’m in need of a seeing-eye dog at the moment.”

Nardole continued grumbling as he followed the Doctor into the TARDIS. 

“I’ll need to get off here,” Jenny told them. “I’ve still got a bit of a headache from earlier. But Doctor,” she said, “thank you. I mean it. You saved my life out there.”

The Doctor squirmed uncomfortably. “Yes, well, don’t waste it. Chin up, and all that. Jones, make sure she gets home in one piece.” He shut the door and, after a moment, the TARDIS dematerialised with its usual metallic wheeze.

“There’s a Boots on our way back,” Harry offered as they left the campus. “I can stop in and get you some ibuprofen—”

“It’s all right, you don’t need to,” Jenny said. “I’ll see you later.”

“We still live in the same building, don’t we? Isn’t that where we’re headed?”

She shook her head. “I’m going to take a ramble around. Clear my thoughts.”

“Do you want company—”

“No,” she said sharply. He flinched. “I just need to be alone for a bit,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice level.

Judging by the look on Harry’s face, he was starting to understand what she was trying to say. “Jenny, about what happened…” he began quietly.

“We’ll talk about it later. Goodnight, Harry.”

For the briefest of moments, their eyes met, and Jenny could see the obvious hurt in his eyes.

She wondered what he was seeing in hers.

* * *

“I’m surprised,” Missy said. “I always assumed that you normally piloted your TARDIS with your eyes closed.”

“I probably could have chanced it,” the Doctor admitted, “but figured that it would be safer if Smith and Jones did it.” He laughed briefly. “Never thought I’d say _that_ about them.”

“At least your eyes _look_ back to normal,” she noted, opening the packet of crisps he had brought along. “Even if they’re only for decorative purposes.”

“It would be very awkward if you tried to escape,” he noted wearily, “so I’d appreciate it if you did me the favour of not making the attempt.”

“Those sunglasses make you look ridiculous. Remember when you used to have the brainy specs?” Missy asked, sounding wistful. “I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but I did like those specs. Why can’t you use a pair of those for your little sonic gadget?”

“Because I’d have to build them from scratch, and if I could do that I wouldn’t need them, would I? Besides,” he added, “the tint hides the fact that my eyes aren’t focusing on anything.”

“Oh, because it would be so terrible for someone to realise that you need help?” she drawled.

“Well, if I haven’t got my pride, what have I got left?”

“And all this because you went running off after a distress signal.”

“The universe shows its true face when it asks for help.”

“Shows its true face,” Missy repeated. “Is that what’s keeping _you_ from asking for help, Doctor?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are with our first tentative steps into "Why Cat included so many Angst-related tags for this fic." Only three more TARDIS trips to go...
> 
> I'll probably be repeating this until the day I die, but THANK YOU to everyone for reading, commenting, and leaving kudos! 
> 
> Other stuff:  
> \- I'm still answering questions in the comments, and there are some great questions from the previous chapter that include stuff like "How did Jenny and Harry meet?" and "Do either of them have dreams like John Smith did in 'Human Nature'?" I had SO MUCH FUN creating the answers, so keep 'em coming!  
> \- This might be a good spot to mention that I have a pretty open blanket permission policy for transformative works based on my fanfic, so long as you give me some kind of credit and a heads up.
> 
> Stay safe, fam! <3


	6. Trip No. 8: Bristol to Leeds, 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Series 10, Episode 7: “The Pyramid at the End of the World”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Note:** The original version of this episode involved a situation with an out-of-control bacterium potentially destroying all life on Earth. Given that we're in the middle of a global pandemic at the moment, this chapter might be a little stressful for some readers, so I wanted to just give a heads up that this chapter retains that plot element.
> 
> Anyway, welcome to the chapter in which almost Everything Happens. (Unlike last chapter, in which Everything Almost Happens).

“What do you mean, she’s not in Bristol anymore?” the Doctor demanded. His voice was just as loud and bristly over the phone as it would have been in person.

“I mean exactly what I said,” Harry said wearily. “Jenny hasn’t been here for ages—she took a summer fellowship in Leeds at the end of term.”

“She’s in _Leeds?”_

“Yes. Why did it take you so long to notice?”

“There was a thing with a book and the Pope. Why would she go _there_ of all places?”

Harry continued pacing back and forth in the Doctor’s office. “The University of Leeds has an agricultural science centre that was looking for research fellows.”

“Since when has she had an interest in plants?” the Doctor asked.

_Since we nearly kissed at the mining station and she decided to run for her bloody life instead of discussing what that might mean for us._

“She’s interested in everything,” was what he said instead. “Where are _you,_ incidentally? You haven’t held a lecture in over a month.”

“Turmezistan.”

“Gesundheit,” he couldn’t help snarking.

“That wasn’t a sneeze, that was a country. Turmezistan. _That’s_ where I am right now.”

Harry frowned. “That’s not a real country.”

“Sure, it is. It’s got a UN base and a lovely five-thousand year-old pyramid that wasn’t there yesterday. I’ll send you a selfie.”

“Fine, fine, I believe you.”

“Well, that’s an awful idea. Why would you do that?”

“To move the conversation along,” Harry said impatiently. He sat down in the desk chair. “Do you need a hand with your unexpected pyramid thing?”

“No,” the Doctor sighed, “without Smith it wouldn’t be the same.”

_Tell me about it._

“I can still do _something,”_ Harry insisted.

“You want to do something, go find her. I need the matched set with me.”

“I tried,” Harry said, trying to ignore the ache those words elicited, “but she hasn’t returned my texts. She might pick up if you called, though.”

“No time,” the Doctor said. “The Secretary-General wants a word with me. Bloody nuisance. Find Smith, get her back to Bristol, then call me back.”

Before Harry could reply, the call ended.

“Get Smith back to Bristol,” he muttered to himself. “Sure. No problem.”

His phone chimed with the notification of an incoming text from the Doctor. Probably that selfie he had promised…

But Harry’s attention was primarily taken up by the sound of another phone beeping at the same time.

He turned and saw Jenny Smith standing in the doorway of the office.

“Well,” she said with a nervous smile, “I’m in Bristol and you found me. Good work.”

“You’re back?” It was a silly question, because she was standing _right there,_ but the relationship between Harry’s brain and his mouth was a little rocky at the moment.

She fidgeted, which he knew (but wished he didn’t) was a sign that she was feeling uncomfortable. “Just for the day,” she explained. “I came to pick up the rest of the things in my flat. They’ve extended my fellowship to the end of the year.”

“You’re staying there.” His stomach and feet felt like they had both turned into lead.

“Yes.”

“For good.”

She pressed her lips together into a thin line. “Yes.”

He felt himself beginning to tremble. “That’s an impressive amount of effort to go to just to avoid me,” he managed to say.

“Excuse me?” Jenny demanded. “To _avoid_ you?”

“We were supposed to talk about what happened!” he snapped. “That’s what you said—we’d talk about it later—and then you moved to bloody _Leeds!”_

“So what?”

“So you _moved to Leeds_ to avoid having a difficult conversation!”

If Jenny’s eyes were capable of shooting daggers, Harry would have been dead by now. “I moved to Leeds because I got a fellowship!” she cried. “This might come as a surprise, Harry, but not every decision I make revolves around _you!”_

“You didn’t even tell me before you left! You didn’t return my calls or my texts or emails—”

“Do you realise how obsessive you sound right now? I was _busy!”_

“After everything that happened, I would have thought I deserved to at least know that you were leaving.”

He noticed that she was trembling as well. “Then maybe we’re not as close as you thought we were,” she hissed.

“You saved my life at Chasm Forge,” Harry said, knowing that there was a real risk of him crying if he wasn’t careful. “I almost died and you saved me and _you_ almost died and we almost kissed and then we _never talked after that._ Can you blame me for feeling a little hurt?”

Jenny took a shaky breath before replying. “Things were… intense. We weren’t thinking rationally. If we’d tried to talk about it then, it wouldn’t have ended well.”

“Well, I’m currently a mess and you don’t seem particularly rosy either, so tell me: did it work?”

She winced and looked away.

He sighed, feeling the anger bleeding out of him and leaving only sadness behind. “Jenny… all I wanted was a conversation. Nothing more than that. If something had come out of it, fine, but I wasn’t trying to get you into bed or into a relationship. I just wanted to know how you felt.”

Her reply was quiet and mostly directed at the carpet. “I wouldn’t have had an answer for you.”

“You have an answer for everything.”

“Not for things like this,” she said, shaking her head.

“Is that why you applied for the fellowship? I know you’re probably brilliant at it, but biology wasn’t your primary academic interest.”

“I needed a change of pace.”

_From your studies or from me?_

“Well, before you pop off back north,” he asked hesitantly, “could we at least have that conversation?”

Jenny suddenly looked very tired. “Why?”

“Because I was hoping that you might have an answer by now.”

“Harry—” But whatever reply she had was interrupted by the sound of her phone ringing. “It’s the Doctor,” she said, answering it.

“Smith! Is that Jones behind you?”

“Yes,” Harry piped up, realising that it was a video call… sort of. The Doctor’s end of the conversation was somewhere indoors with a few other people. “Why can’t we see you?”

“Sonic sunglasses,” the Doctor explained. “You’re seeing what I see. Good work finding her, Jones. Quick favour: the world might be about to end, but no one’s sure how or where. Any chance you two could look into that?”

“Before we begin our really creative Googling, do you have anything more specific you could tell us?” Jenny asked. 

“Destruction of all organic life from what I can tell. Planet Earth without a single living thing, dead as the moon, in under a year’s time.”

“What is _that_ thing?” Harry asked. There was a figure in a red hooded robe with a face that looked more like a shredded tyre than anything human.

“Alien invasion,” the Doctor said grimly. “They’re known as the Monks.”

Harry groaned. “Okay, this is me just spitballing here, but did you consider that maybe _they’re_ the ones responsible for the whole apocalypse thing?”

“Ah, this is where it gets a bit more complicated: they’ve statistically modelled the probability of human events from the sidelines, which is how they were able to give a few of us a sneak peek. They’re just watching the impending catastrophe go down… and offering to help if we ask.”

“Which certainly doesn’t sound suspicious at all,” Jenny remarked drily. “Why do they need to be asked?”

A gravelly whisper that sounded like an army of ghosts answered her through the phone: “Power must consent.”

“What does that mean?” the Doctor asked.

“Those who hold power on this world must consent to our dominion.”

“Dominion,” Harry echoed. “Of course they’d put it into the most ominous terms possible—wait,” he added as the thought occurred to him, “if they’re powerful enough to do whatever dominion thing they’re promising, why would they need our consent? They could just conquer us anyway.”

“We must be wanted,” the Monk replied. “We must be loved. To rule through fear is inefficient.”

“Loved, eh?” Jenny murmured. “Guess they’re all about good PR.”

Harry shook his head. “Someone fears you, they only comply when you’re around and watching them. Someone loves you, they’ll go above and beyond what you asked, even after you’ve gone.”

It was only then that he realised that the two of them were pressed side by side so that Harry could see the screen of Jenny’s phone, and that he had delivered those last few sentences almost directly into her ear. They both took a hasty and awkward step away from one another.

Someone out of the Doctor’s field of vision spoke up: “If consent is what you need, I consent now.”

“Is that the Secretary-General of the UN?” Jenny asked, bewildered, as the man stepped into view.

“Don’t do this!” the Doctor warned him. “Please, don’t even consider this!”

“Do you have power?” the Monk inquired.

“I have power,” the Secretary-General said. His voice was trembling.

“Does power consent?”

“Please stop,” the Doctor insisted. “Just stop this!”

“If your consent is impure,” the Monk said, “it will kill you.”

“Impure?” Jenny and the Doctor both repeated the word at the same time. “What does that mean, impure?” the Doctor asked.

But the Monk continued to address the Secretary-General. “You act out of fear. Fear is not consent.”

Returning to his previous position so that he could look over Jenny’s shoulder, Harry watched the Monk reach out to touch the Secretary-General… and a moment later, the man was reduced to dust.

“Oh my god,” Jenny whispered, as the Doctor started shouting.

* * *

“There’s a nearly infinite number of ways that the world could end,” Harry complained. “How do we narrow it down to a single thing?”

“The lack of any organic life at all is a big clue,” Jenny pointed out. “There’s not a lot that will do that in under a year.”

She and Harry were both pacing back and forth in the Doctor’s office. Every time their paths crossed, Jenny fought the urge to touch him in some way, even if it was just to jab a finger in his eye.

_Why is he so damned distracting?_

Instead, she kept talking: “It would have to be something that attacks cells indiscriminately and spreads quickly. Airborne, but also able to be transmitted through the water and to other less accessible places. Doctor, did the Monks give you a peek at the ocean floor, by any chance?”

“No,” the Doctor said through the speaker of Jenny’s phone. “Though what I was able to see in that vision didn’t look especially humid.”

“Some kind of biological weapon, then?” Harry suggested.

“Maybe," Jenny said as she considered it. “It would have to go out of control almost immediately after being deployed, though. Most weapons wouldn’t be designed to wipe out _everything,_ not unless you were trying to kill yourself and everyone else all at once.”

“Wait… what’s that thing called…” Harry said, coming to a stop and snapping his fingers while trying to remember something. “The end-of-the-world theory with the goop…”

“Grey goo?” she supplied.

“Right, that: self-replicating machines that consume everything in order to make more of itself.”

Jenny nodded. “Until it runs out of available biomass. That would fit with what we're looking for.”

“Is there technology that could do that?”

“Not yet,” the Doctor interrupted. “Not at the level needed for this. Machines are still too picky to consume everything.”

“A biological equivalent would be possible, though,” Jenny pointed out. “And there are probably research labs around the world with the capability to manufacture something like that.”

“How many, do you think?” Harry asked, sitting down on top of the Doctor’s desk.

Jenny shrugged. “Thousands. Not sure how we could figure out which one.”

“The Monks are watching it," the Doctor said, sounding a little more animated than before, “but they wouldn’t be the only ones. Let me find the list of labs on UNIT’s watchlist related to biochemical research. Give me a minute. And by ‘me’ I mean ‘Nardole.’ Nardole, you have one minute. Send the list to Smith and Jones when you’re done.”

As they waited for the results, Jenny’s mind raced through possible doomsday scenarios that could cause the extinction of all life on Earth. “Doctor,” she said, “narrow it down by research on genetically modified bacteria that have reached Stage Two of their trials.” She turned to Harry. “Anything earlier wouldn’t be virulent enough to spread that quickly.”

She had a bad feeling about this.

“How many have we got?” the Doctor asked.

“Four hundred and twenty-eight,” came Nardole’s voice in the background.

Both Jenny and Harry’s phones chimed with a notification. Jenny pulled up the list on hers and started scrolling through it.

The Doctor’s voice was taut with impatience. “Can you hack the feeds?”

“What, all of them?” Nardole asked.

“Well, can you?”

“Of course I can,” he replied huffily, “I’m not _just_ sexy, but like I said, there’s over four hundred of them. No one person could watch them all.” For some reason, Jenny heard him mutter “especially you.”

“We don’t need to watch them,” the Doctor corrected him. “Just turn all of them off.”

“Why?”

“The first camera to go back on will be the one the Monks are watching most closely.”

“Wait…” Jenny said as she scanned the list. “One of those spots… that’s my lab! That’s where I’ve been working all term!”

“What are you working on?”

Her stomach dropped. “Biochemical trials related to the bacteria _R. planticola._ It’s meant to weaken the cellular integrity of the root systems of plants.” She closed her eyes and groaned. “Damn it, Douglas!”

“Who’s Douglas?” Harry asked.

“One of my labmates,” she explained. “He’s lax with safety protocols and since it’s a Sunday, he’s probably hungover to boot. Erica’s usually there with me during the week, but her mum was sick so it’s just Douglas there today. If a catastrophic accident were to happen, it would be today.”

“Camera’s back on,” Nardole interjected. “And confirmed: Centre for Plant Sciences at the University of Leeds.”

“Well done, Nardole,” the Doctor said. “Well, more like ‘well done, me,’ since it was my idea. Leeds. Right. Smith, meet me there.”

“I’m in Bristol,” Jenny reminded him.

“What are you doing there? I thought you were in Leeds!”

“And I thought _you_ were in Bristol,” she snapped. “People travel.”

“Well, I feel like I should have been consulted,” the Doctor grumbled.

Jenny rolled her eyes. “You and Harry should form a club,” she muttered.

Harry had apparently overheard her, because his expression now looked a little wounded.

 _Deal with that later,_ she ordered herself. “Are you heading there now?"

“Someone’s got to be there and since it isn’t you I suppose it’ll be me. Talk to you lot after I’m done saving the world.”

“Doctor, wait!” she said urgently. “If something’s gone wrong in there, don’t go out of the TARDIS without protective gear. You might not be human, but you’re definitely organic.”

“Am I?” he said sarcastically. “I hadn’t noticed. Nardole, jot that down.”

Annoyed, Jenny hung up. “He’s going to be insufferable once he pulls this off,” she groaned.

Harry smiled, then gave a tiny snort of laughter. “He’s going to call you back in five minutes begging for help, you know.”

“Well, that would be a first,” she answered with a smile of her own. “The Doctor actually asking someone for help.”

“I see he’s taught both of us well,” he said ruefully. Before Jenny could figure out if she was offended or amused, Harry asked a question: “Do you like it there?”

“What?”

“Leeds. Do you like it there? I know you’re from somewhere in Yorkshire… does it feel like home?”

“It’s…” Jenny felt a twinge in her chest.

_It doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like home at all._

She felt homesick all the time, but couldn’t put her finger on what exactly she was homesick _for._

But given how she was feeling at the moment, she had an uneasy suspicion of what it might be.

“Not yet,” she said, trying to smile. “I’m still settling in.”

“Made any friends?”

“Not really. Too busy.”

 _And because I’m not entirely sure_ _how_ _to make friends._

“No one? Not even Erica and that damned Douglas fellow?”

Jenny shook her head. “We only talk about chemical formulas.”

He laughed. “I don’t know, that sounds like it would count as ‘casual conversation’ for you.” His smile faded into something more serious… and more fixated. “You could have called me, you know.”

She sighed in exasperation. “Do we really have to talk about this—”

Her phone rang. “It’s already happened,” the Doctor said when she answered. “The accident. The bacteria’s mutated to something that’ll turn any living thing it touches into gunk.”

“Okay, okay, not a disaster,” Jenny whispered, mostly to herself, “not yet, anyway, so long as we neutralise it before it gets out of the lab. Can you put Douglas on the line? I need to tell him what programs to bring up on the fabricator.”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“By the time I got here, he was already contaminated. Dissolved before I could do anything.”

On the one hand, Jenny felt grief at the loss of someone she had worked alongside for weeks… but on the other hand, she was internally cursing him for both screwing things up _and_ for obviously not keeping his suit sealed like he was supposed to.

She felt Harry’s hand on her shoulder. “You all right?” he asked quietly.

Jenny nodded and took a deep breath. “Then it’s going to have to be you that fixes it, Doctor. I can guide you through what you need to do to engineer a kind of enzyme inhibitor, which should deactivate the self-replication, but first I need to take a look at the bacteria’s current structure. Over on the lab bench on the east wall, there’s something that looks a bit like a 3D printer. Do you see it?”

There was a pause. “Yes,” the Doctor said at last.

“Good. Go to the monitor and bring up the program called X46-38B-9. While that’s booting up, go to the shelves on the left and find a reagent labelled R.PLA.47MN. Once you’ve got that, plug it into the slot on the upper left side of the fabricator. Then grab an empty slide and get a sample of some of the gunk. Doesn’t have to be much, and obviously keep it away from anything organic. Then insert the slide into the—”

“Will you slow down!” the Doctor snapped. “I can’t be everywhere at once!”

“Isn’t Nardole helping you?”

“The TARDIS is acting a bit funny at the moment. He’s off having a somewhat heated argument with her. Start over with the bit about the shelves.”

He really wasn’t good at taking directions, Jenny noticed as she ordered him around the lab. She had to repeatedly point out exactly where every vial was on the shelves and which button he needed to press, and he was apparently so stressed out that his fingers kept fumbling whenever he tried to grab something.

She checked the time on her phone and breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re in luck, by the way,” she said. “You’ve still got a little over fifteen minutes until the next air filtration cycle kicks in, which should be more than enough time to work out an inhibitor… though it would obviously be better if you moved a little faster than you’re moving right now.”

“What happens when the cycle goes off?”

“It’ll pump the bacteria into the atmosphere.”

“That’s an awful filtration system!” He almost sounded _offended._

“I know, I’ve been arguing with them about it for weeks!” she agreed. “Have you got the program pulled up?”

“Yes.”

“Good. There’s a bank of knobs in front of you that are labelled with the different types of molecular structures you can use to alter the model of the sample you took and design an inhibitor enzyme. It’ll take some playing around with but just make sure you’re keeping the overall pH between three and five and you should be fine. All right,” she said, analysing the protein structures on the screen, “there’s a long lattice on the rightmost part of the structure. All you have to do is use the knobs to fold the lattice around until the fourth, ninth, and twentieth strands meet in a kind of rabbit ears thing… if the rabbit had three ears… but you get the picture.”

“I don’t, actually.” The Doctor’s voice was worryingly tense. “I can’t see the labels on the knobs.”

“What are you talking about, Doctor?”

“When I lost my vision at Chasm Forge, it never came back. I’m still blind.” It sounded like it was killing him to say those words.

“Then how have you been doing… well, _any_ of the things you’ve been doing?” Harry asked.

“Sonic sunglasses,” he explained. “Feeds data into my brain but doesn’t do well with print. I can ask Nardole to get a camera feed up—”

“Or you could just send him here to pick me up and I’ll do it myself,” Jenny interrupted impatiently. “Even with the travel time, it’ll be faster than trying to guide you through it via satellite.”

“The lab is full of bacteria that will destroy all organic life!”

“Yeah, exactly, so chop-chop! The sooner I can get there, the sooner I can fix it.”

“Nardole!” the Doctor bellowed. “I hope you’ve talked the TARDIS round—Smith needs a lift!”

“Doctor?” Harry asked suddenly.

“What?”

“If someone were to give consent, what do you think the Monks would do?”

“They’ve been modelling every event in human history, simulating entire events from day one until now… with that kind of knowledge, they could rewrite the history of the entire planet. We’d never have known a time when they weren’t here, ruling over everything.”

Harry’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

“So let’s not have it get to that point, shall we?” the Doctor said. “The sooner we stop this, the less time the Monks will have to find someone powerful enough and idiotic enough to tell them yes.”

Faintly, on the other end of the line right before Jenny hung up, she could hear the TARDIS dematerialising… a sound that was quickly drowned out by the sound of it reappearing in the Doctor’s office.

But something about the normal wheezing sound was different. “It sounds like it’s sick,” Jenny said. 

After a few seconds without any sign from inside, Harry knocked on the door. “Nardole? Everything okay in there?” He attempted to open the door, which turned out to be locked. “One of these days, we really need to ask the Doctor about a spare key.”

Something stirred in Jenny’s memory. “When I would leave a spare key,” she murmured as she looked at the familiar blue box, “I would always leave it in a secret compartment above the door…” She gasped. “Harry, give me a boost!”

“You’re heavier than you look,” he grumbled as he tried to balance her on his shoulders. “What are you carrying in your pockets, iron bars?”

“Oi!” she objected, feeling around for somewhere on the ‘Police Box’ sign where a key might be hidden—”Aha!” she exclaimed, pulling it out of a small cubbyhole above the ‘P’ in ‘Police Box.’ “Here it is!”

As she jumped down, Harry looked a bit mystified. “How did you know—”

“Lucky guess,” she said with a shrug, then opened the door and froze.

The interior of the TARDIS was dimly lit in a murky red and there was a faint whiff of smoke in the air. 

Sprawled out unconscious on the floor, looking a bit on the singed side, was Nardole.

Jenny approached the controls, which sparked violently before she could get within range. 

“Watch out!” Harry said.

As his words faded away, Jenny noticed how eerily silent the control room was. 

“The engines aren’t working,” she breathed in horror. “The TARDIS can’t take us back.”

* * *

_No TARDIS, no Doctor, and no time._

_We’re doomed._

Harry and Jenny dragged Nardole out of the TARDIS and lay him down onto the carpet. Despite their best efforts, though, they couldn’t wake him up.

“He’s breathing, at least,” Harry noted. He felt like he had to remind _himself_ to breathe as well.

Jenny took out her phone. “We should call the Doctor—”

“Wait!” Harry cried, holding out a hand to stop her. “If we don’t talk to him, then theoretically we can travel back to the second immediately after Nardole left. If we call him, then we’re locking those events into place.”

“I’m not sure that’s how causality works,” she said, “and if we _don’t_ call him, there’s no one who can tell us how to fix the TARDIS!”

“Even if the fix was simple,” he said, “we won’t have enough time to fix it _and_ get rid of the bacteria in under fifteen minutes.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?” she demanded.

Harry fought back a shudder. “The only thing we have left: call the Monks.”

She gaped at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m _deadly_ serious,” he replied. “If that bacteria gets out, is there any way to stop it?”

Jenny grit her teeth. “No.” She glared at him. “But how is letting aliens conquer the world a better option?”

“Because we can’t fight them if we’re dead!” Harry shouted. “Yes, the odds of overthrowing alien overlords that can alter the history of the world are pretty slim, but it’s better than no odds at all! We take it one crisis at a time: survive, and _then_ fight.”

Her eyes blazed with growing anger. “That was why you asked the Doctor what would happen, wasn’t it?”

“I wanted to know our options.” He was finding it hard to look her in the eye. “This wasn’t my first choice.”

“So you’re willing to sell out the human race just to save your own neck,” she spat.

“It’s not my neck!” he shouted. “It’s everyone’s neck! It’s yours and the Doctor’s and everyone we’ve ever met in our entire lives!” He felt like his chest was going to explode. “I know we come up with third options all the time but there _is no third option for this!_ This is the choice we’re left with: ask the Monks for help or everything dies.”

“Why do you get to make the choice for everyone else?”

“Because I’m an idiot!” He looked around the room. “Hello? Brothers of the Order of St. Spooky? I know you’re watching because you’re watching bloody everything! I’ve got a TARDIS and an idea.”

“This won’t work!” Jenny protested.

“Sure it will. They want power? We’ve got the only time machine on planet Earth. That’s got to count for something.”

“Not the part about power,” she said impatiently. “The part about consent. It won’t work unless you mean it, _really_ mean it. Remember what happened to the Secretary-General: just acting out of fear won’t work. It’s not consent if it’s out of fear.”

“Then what counts as consent?”

A gravelly chorus of whispers answered: “You must ask for our help, and want it, and know you will then be ours. Only then can the link be formed.”

Harry let out a startled yelp. One moment they were alone in the Doctor’s office and the next a trio of corpses in robes were there with them.

“What link?” Jenny asked.

“Do I have the kind of power you’re looking for?” Harry asked them.

“A Time Lord has power. Yes.”

Harry didn’t know what a ‘Time Lord’ was, but he suspected that it might have something to do with the Doctor, which meant that his gamble had paid off: apparently he and Jenny qualified as the Doctor’s representatives.

“Do you consent?” they asked him.

“What counts as consent?” Jenny interrupted.

“Love,” Harry said, looking squarely at the Monks. “Love is consent, isn’t it? If I asked out of love, it would be consent, right?”

“Yes.”

“Harry,” Jenny pleaded, “I know you’ve got a tendency for heroics, but even you can’t possibly love _everyone_ and mean it.”

“It’s not everyone,” Harry said. He turned to face her. “It’s you.”

Her face went pale. “Harry—”

“I’d felt it for a while, even before Chasm Forge, but I couldn’t put a name to it. The only thing I knew was that if you had died there, it would have killed me too because a world without you in it would be unbearable. It was like my life wasn’t real until the day I met you: my home, my past, my memories… I’d never known what _home_ felt like until you came along.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath, but he couldn’t stop the torrent of words still pouring out of him. “I tried to feel nothing when you moved away but I couldn’t. When it comes to you, it’s like I’m feeling every possible emotion all at once.” He felt himself shaking. “And if you don’t feel the same—you don’t have to feel the same, it makes no difference to how I feel about you, but I have to say it: the truth. Without hope. Without witness. Without reward. I love you, Jenny Smith.”

She stared at him in silence, eyes wide.

“So that’s why I know it will work,” he continued. “Because if it means that you’ll survive, then—”

“Wait,” she said.

“—it’s worth it to me. I can live with the consequences—”

“No, _wait!”_ she interrupted a second time. “I have an idea, one that won’t involve the Monks.” She grabbed him by the arm and dragged him down the hall. “Sorry, boys, we found that third option!” she called behind her.

The Monks did not follow.

“Where are we going?” Harry asked.

“The vault,” she explained. 

“Oh no,” he breathed as he realised what her idea was. “You’re not thinking that we let it out, are you?”

“Why not? No matter what’s in there, it has to be better than letting the Monks rewrite all of history.”

“You don’t know that for sure. For all we know, it’s a sentient black hole.”

“It plays piano, it’s been here as long as the Doctor has, and he brings it takeaway food and spends hours inside with it. I’ve been trying to work it out for a while now, and you know what I think? I think they’re an alien like the Doctor—the same species. Which means—”

Harry understood. “Which means they might know how to fix the TARDIS.” He frowned. “It’s still an awful risk.”

“We’re low on options, as you previously pointed out, and I assume that they would rather not die either.”

As they approached the door to the vault, Harry realised another potential problem. “How are we going to get the door open?”

“It can’t be too difficult,” Jenny reasoned. “There isn’t a keyhole or anything.”

“That still doesn’t mean that it would be easier.”

To his surprise, she gave him a wide grin. “I’ve been working on something that might help.” She pulled an item out of her back pocket.

“Is that…” Harry felt his jaw drop. “Is that a _sonic screwdriver?”_

“It’s very rudimentary, but yes. Or at least as close as I could work out based on the pieces of the one that the Doctor broke at the mining station. It’s not reliable by any means, but I’ve obviously had a few months to tinker with it and it might be useful for this.”

He gave it a closer look. “Did you make the casing out of spoons?”

She shrugged. “I spent most of my money acquiring the inner parts, so I had to economize for the cosmetic bits and use what I had lying around.”

“Which was apparently a cutlery drawer.”

“Shush, I need to focus if this is going to work.” She pointed the device at the vault door and scrunched up her face in concentration.

A few tense seconds passed; he could hear her whisper “please, come on, please…”

And, with a low rumble, the vault door opened, revealing its occupant…

…who looked a bit like Mary Poppins at the end of a pub crawl.

“Well, well,” she said with an accent that was an echo of the Doctor’s Scottish burr, “the infamous Smith and Jones, here at last.”

“The Doctor’s in danger, the world’s about to end, and there are evil alien Monks who want to revise Earth’s history in their favour,” Jenny said, returning the screwdriver to her pocket. “We have a malfunctioning TARDIS and very little time. Can you help?”

The woman examined them closely for another second or two, then gave them what Harry could only describe as a ‘wolfish grin.’ “You’re not afraid that I’ll eat your pretty little faces off?”

“The way I see it,” Jenny said, “is that you’re probably the lesser of two evils. Will you help us or not?”

“I can see why he likes you,” she said. “Lead the way, my noble rescuers.”

“You seem to know our names already,” Harry noted as they hurried back up to the Doctor’s office. “What’s your name?”

“Missy,” she said. “Bit twee, of course, but there’s a story behind it that I won’t bore you with at the moment.”

“Why were you locked up?”

She made a small sound of amusement. “Murder, slaughter, decimation, general mayhem, semi-accidental annihilation of a quarter of the universe with applied mathematics, highly creative desecration of a planet’s worth of corpses, irresponsible operation of a paradox machine, compulsive treason, electoral fraud, dereliction of duty in a time of war, speeding tickets, tax evasion… you get the idea. Classic villainous behavior.”

“Yeah, your aesthetic doesn’t exactly scream ‘law-abiding citizen.’” Harry noted.

“You’re right about the law-abiding part,” she agreed, “but the screaming bit is quite on-brand.” She gave him an overexaggerated version of a wink.

He probably should be more nervous around her than he was, but something about her was strangely familiar in a way that seemed to automatically put him at ease.

This was likely what made her so dangerous, he realised. “Nice to know that the galactic criminal justice system doesn’t believe in the death penalty.”

She laughed outright at that. “Oh, they do. I was technically executed, but for Time Lords death is like the flu. I got better.”

“Is that what you and the Doctor are?” he asked. “Time Lords?”

“Time _Lady,_ in my case, but of course I’m old fashioned. Regardless, I was tried and executed, and someone had to stand watch over my body for a thousand years to make sure that I didn’t try anything tricksy. The Doctor and I have a history, so he’s the lucky one who gets to guard me for the next nine hundred and thirty-ish years until I’ve paid my debt to society. But since you’ve asked me to help save the Doctor and this little pet sanctuary of a planet, perhaps I’ll get time off for good behavior. Ah,” she said as they entered the office, “I see Nardole had a little malfunction as well. Bargain bin cyborgs are so unreliable.”

Missy raised her foot and, for a moment, Harry worried that she was about to step on Nardole’s face, but instead she brought it down just to the side, crushing his eyeglasses underfoot. “Oopsie,” she said. Seeing Jenny’s glare, she smirked. “Oh, don’t worry about him, he doesn’t even need them. It’s a vanity thing: he wants to look smart. I’d say that the Doctor does the same thing with those shades of his, but the silly grump finally found a use for them.”

“You know that he’s blind, then,” Jenny said.

“He told me,” she confirmed. “Honestly, sometimes he treats that vault like a confessional. It’s exhausting. Speaking of confession, though: let’s hop to it and stop those Monks, shall we?”

It was difficult for Harry to ignore the subconscious countdown of how very little time they all had left before the world ended, especially since Missy seemed to be taking her time examining the TARDIS’s systems. “I swear,” she muttered, “he keeps this thing together with string and paste…”

“Is it fixable?” Jenny asked impatiently.

“Of course it’s fixable,” Missy replied. “I could probably spend the majority of my imprisonment bringing this thing back up to something resembling ‘functional,’ but for now we can at least hotwire it for a single trip.” She lifted up and removed a section of the console’s panel. “Don’t tell him I said this,” she ordered them sternly, “but that silly screwdriver of his would have come in handy right about now.” 

Jenny smirked. “Would this help?” She held out her own sonic screwdriver.

“Well, well…” the Time Lady said, taking it from her. “How did you manage to nick this from him?”

“I didn’t.” Jenny’s grin grew even wider. “I made it myself.”

For the first time in their brief acquaintance, Missy looked surprised. She examined it closely. “Did you now?”

“I’m just that clever.”

“Obviously.” Her expression actually grew a little uneasy for a moment. “Well, don’t just stand there, you two: there are panels on the other side that need rewiring as well.”

Much like when they had piloted the TARDIS back from Chasm Forge, Harry felt a peculiar innate knowledge of how the ship’s systems were structured, though not in a way that he ever could have explained to someone. 

“So,” Missy remarked as they worked, “he finally had to come clean over the loss of his sight, did he?”

Jenny nodded grimly. “He couldn’t read the labels on the vials in the lab.”

“It’s funny, of course,” Missy said, “because there’s an easy fix for it. He’s just too stubborn to do it.”

“Why? What is it?” If it turned out that the Doctor could have saved them all this trouble, Harry was going to throttle him.

“If he regenerated, he’d get his sight back. Hell, he’d get brand new eyes—brand new everything… Ah,” she noted with a sly grin. “He hasn’t told you about that yet, has he?”

Harry exchanged a glance with Jenny. “You thought it might be some kind of cellular refresh,” he noted.

“That was your theory, not mine,” she objected.

“But you’re the one who pointed out that there would be a need for it in the first place.”

Missy rolled her eyes. “Yes, you’re both very smart, gold stars all around—do you want the explanation or not?”

Jenny frowned and resumed her work with the wiring. 

“Go on,” Harry prompted the Time Lady. 

“A ‘pretty please’ would be nice, you know.”

“Pretty please, you glamorous menace to life and limb,” he said drily.

“That’s more like it,” she said approvingly. “Regeneration is a little trick that Time Lords evolved over millions of years to cheat death by changing into a completely new person. New face, new body, new accent… but the same memories, same general values and morals—if you had any to begin with, which, spoiler alert, I don’t. The end result gives you more years to work with and a few more personality quirks.”

“Then why hasn’t he done it?” Harry asked.

“Because he’s stubborn—and, more importantly, he’s terrified of changing. From what I gather, his last few transitions were a bit… explosive. Traumatic. And now, of course, it’s too late: even if he regenerated immediately, it would take time for him to return to his senses, and time is a commodity that we’re rather short on.”

After another few minutes of work, Missy pronounced their efforts adequate enough to try turning on the engines. As they hummed back to life, Harry released a breath that he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

“Can you pilot it?” Jenny asked.

Missy gave a few buttons on the console a dainty poke. “Clever boy,” she murmured approvingly. “No,” she told them, “I’m still bio-locked out. Really, it’s for the best: this TARDIS and I have had a bit of a rough history. Although,” she added, “hopefully the little round of TLC I just gave it will get me back in its good graces. But I can guide you through it.” She sat down on the nearby steps. 

“We need to return to the point in time immediately after the TARDIS left Leeds,” Jenny informed her. “In the exact same position it was in at that moment.”

“Easy enough, then.” Missy began giving them directions on how to enter the temporal coordinates. Like before, it all just seemed to make _sense:_ the way that each step fit together like pieces in a puzzle that Harry had solved over and over again.

“And then flip the—ah, I see you’re already doing it,” Missy said.

“He had us do the fast-return thing before,” Jenny explained, reaching for a switch on the panel to her left while still keeping her eyes on the monitor in front of her.

Missy’s expression grew uneasy again. “Quick studies, the both of you.”

“We’re just that clever,” Harry replied with a grin. At this point, he knew exactly what he was supposed to be doing, moving around the controls like he had done it all his life.

And beside him, Jenny was working the same way: the two of them moving in sync without consciously deciding to do so, two halves of a seamless whole.

They reached the final lever at the same time, though Harry was ever-so-slightly faster and got his hand on it first. 

To his surprise, Jenny suddenly leaned in and gave him a quick kiss. “Just in case we explode before we get there,” she explained while starting to blush.

Still a bit stunned, all Harry could manage to do was nod.

Jenny smirked and placed her fingers directly over his. “Ready?” she asked, looking him in the eyes with a gleam of something that Harry realised hadn’t been there before: 

She finally had an answer for him.

“Ready,” he echoed as they pulled the lever down together.

* * *

Although Jenny was focused mainly on synthesising the antidote to the rogue bacteria, she could still hear the Doctor and Missy bickering inside the TARDIS like an old married couple.

“I had it perfectly under control!” the Doctor sputtered.

“No, you did _not,”_ Missy scoffed, “and your ridiculous definition of pride nearly got us all killed!”

“You’re one to talk, you know.”

She made an offended noise. “Begging your pardon, but I think you’ll find that I’ve grown more humble with age.”

“You _influenced the human concept of an afterlife_ and tried to give me an army as a birthday present!”

“Yes, and wasn’t that generous of me?” she asked, attempting to sound innocent. “You know, those two did something that you’ve never seemed able to do properly.”

“What is that?”

“Ask for my help.”

“You’re usually trying to murder me,” the Doctor said incredulously.

“There’s room for negotiation!” she protested.

 _“How?”_ he demanded.

The two Time Lords continued squabbling until the Doctor finally harrumphed and said nothing more. 

_Sulking, probably,_ Jenny thought with amusement.

Behind her, Harry was fetching various bits of materials as she requested them, though his speed was a tiny bit hampered by the hazmat suit he was wearing.

An aerosol seemed like the most straightforward way to disperse the inhibitor solution, which added another minute or so to the assembly time. If this method didn’t work, there wouldn’t be time to create another. “Here goes nothing,” she murmured, and triggered the release. 

After a tense few seconds, she noticed something beginning to change: a faint layer of dust accumulated on every surface of the lab. Grabbing a sample, Jenny slid it under a microscope and breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s neutralising the bacteria,” she announced. “Another few minutes and it’ll be safe for the filtration system to vent.” 

“Have we _got_ a few minutes?” Harry asked.

She checked the time and grinned. “Six minutes to spare. I’ll take my reward in jelly babies and grant money, by the way.”

Harry’s laugh had a slight note of hysteria to it, but that was to be expected given the circumstances. It was probably the adrenaline still coursing through her system, but Jenny was finding it difficult to look away from his face, even though it was behind a transparent face shield.

She forced herself to focus. “I’ve got one last thing to whip up here,” she told the other three.

_Cellular refresh—assuming it works the way I think it will… hmm, just a small tweak ought to do it._

“Oh, brilliant,” Jenny said to herself as she examined the results.

Armed with a pipette, she charged into the TARDIS. “Got a present for you, Doctor.”

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“Head back, eyes open, don’t blink,” she ordered.

“What are you—” But his protest was cut off by Missy grabbing the Doctor by the hair and yanking his head back with an obvious expression of glee on her face.

“Pretend there's a Weeping Angel coming for you," Missy advised. She gave the Doctor a peck on the forehead, which left a lipstick kiss behind.

“Fancy eyedrops,” Jenny explained as she squeezed the pipette. “All right, you can shut your eyes now. Give them a moment to work.”

“I’m not some kind of science experiment,” he grumbled, freeing himself from Missy’s grasp and rubbing at his forehead.

Jenny sighed in exasperation. “You should have told us what happened. It took me all of five minutes to figure out a solution and you could have saved yourself weeks of difficulty if you had just _said something.”_

“I was handling it!”

“No, you weren’t,” Harry chimed in as he joined them. “So, what did you do?” he asked Jenny.

“You can take the hazmat suit off, by the way,” she said, pulling her own suit off. “And _you_ can open your eyes now, Doctor.”

He blinked a few times… and then his eyes widened as his pupils actually _focused_ on what was in front of him. “How did you…?”

She beamed. “I’m _extremely_ clever. It was actually just a modification of one of the other projects I was working on here: a very basic version of a cellular reset button that I modelled after what you did with the Vardies on that human colony planet. After Missy told us about regeneration, I realised that I could adapt it for this situation.”

“You’re welcome,” Missy purred.

Jenny looked out at the remains of the lab outside the TARDIS door. “The cleanup is going to take ages… we’ll have to sterilise this place within an inch of its life once I notify Health and Safety.”

_And I’ll have to find some way to explain what happened to Douglas…_

_I didn’t really know anything about him. We never talked about anything other than work._

_I still don’t know_ _anyone_ _here. Why is it so hard to let someone into my—_

“Huh,” Harry said, puzzled. “Were your eyes always that colour, Doctor?”

“What colour?”

“They’re… well, actually, they’re the same colour as Jenny’s.”

The memory of Chasm Forge resurfaced: Harry staring at her in wonder as he said: _Your eyes… I couldn’t remember what colour they were…_

And then they had both leaned in and—

Jenny dragged her thoughts back to the present moment. “That’s a bit odd,” she admitted as she examined the Doctor’s irises. “Not sure why it did that. But you _can_ see, right?” She gave him a stern look. “And you’d better tell the truth this time.”

“Yes, yes, I can see, so you can all stop _fussing,”_ the Doctor said irritably. “Speaking of fussing: where’s Nardole?”

“He’s back in Bristol,” Harry explained. “He was knocked unconscious when the TARDIS malfunctioned.”

Missy giggled. “So he’s going to wake up to find the vault empty and the TARDIS gone. Oh, I wish I could see his face.”

“Perhaps you will,” the Doctor said, heading to the controls, “because that’s where we’re heading right now.” He looked at Jenny and Harry. “Ready, you two?”

“Actually, I was hoping that Harry and I could have a talk first,” Jenny said, feeling suddenly nervous. “In private.” 

Harry’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything as he followed her out of the TARDIS and back into the lab.

The Doctor shrugged. “Meet you outside, then.” He closed the door and soon the TARDIS vanished.

“Well,” Harry said as they made their way from the lab to the hallway, “the world is saved. All thanks to you.”

She could feel herself blushing. “It was a team effort.”

He gave a short laugh. “Only if we were grading on a curve. All I did was nearly give the planet to a bunch of data-obsessed alien invaders.” He stopped walking and looked at her. “Seriously, thank you. You were brilliant. I—”

But whatever words he intended to say next were cut off when Jenny closed the distance between them and pulled him in for a kiss.

She really hoped that she wasn’t too late, that she hadn’t ruined her chance, that he really had meant what he said— 

However, the desperate sound that he made, and the way that he put his arms around her, was a good sign that it was more than welcome.

“I…” he whispered when they parted, looking a bit shocked. 

“All right, admittedly that wasn’t exactly _conversing,”_ she replied with a nervous laugh.

He laughed along with her. “I’m certainly not complaining.”

“Let’s keep walking,” Jenny suggested. “I really need some fresh air after all that time in a hazmat suit.” She took his hand in hers and interlaced their fingers together.

“I hadn’t realised it had gotten so late,” Harry noticed as they got within sight of the doors. He checked his hideous wristwatch. “It’s almost midnight.”

Jenny sighed. “I’ll call Erica and the department heads first thing tomorrow. There’s not much that they can do right now anyway.”

“You’re not worried about getting in trouble?”

"Right now, I’m still trying to figure out where my hands and feet are,” she confessed. “I need a few hours to cope with everything that happened. Any of the mess in the lab can be explained away as something Douglas was working on before he died. He can get the credit for neutralising the bacteria.”

“Didn’t the Doctor say that there were cameras watching the lab?”

“Those same cameras also recorded a blue phone box appearing out of thin air.” She did her best to smile. “I might finally get to meet someone from UNIT—I expect they’ll come calling soon to hush everything up.”

When they left the building, the TARDIS was already there waiting for them.

“Well,” Harry said awkwardly, letting go of her hand, “I suppose I should catch my ride back to Bristol.”

“Don’t go,” she blurted out. “Please.”

“What? Oh,” he said with a wince. “Right. Conversation.”

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so now you’re suddenly not in the mood to have one?”

“I didn’t say that,” he replied hastily—in fact, he looked a little panicked. “I just… I suppose I said quite a lot today, and I didn’t want to put you in the position where you felt like you had to respond to all of that… rambling.”

“The things you said when you were talking to the Monks, you mean?”

“Yes. That was… a lot of words all in one go.” He was practically squirming with discomfort.

“All right, it did sound a tiny bit unhinged,” she admitted, “but did you mean it?”

He looked at her nervously… but with a growing ray of hope in his eyes. “That I loved you?”

She nodded. “How did it go again? ‘Without hope, without witness…’”

“‘Without reward,’” he finished.

“Well, today’s your lucky day,” she said teasingly, “because I have a few ideas about that reward bit…”

“You don’t have to—” he protested.

“Why do you think I went to Leeds?” She didn’t wait for him to respond before continuing. “It’s because I don’t like not knowing the answers, and things between us after the mining station were so _many_ questions without answers. And when I’m faced with an uncertainty, I try not to hope for one particular outcome over another, because I don’t want to bias the results.” 

She felt her heart race and had to steel herself to continue with what she wanted to say. “But I _did_ hope for a particular answer to the question of ‘us,’ and I was scared that I would be wrong about it. So I left before I could find out. I thought I could live with the uncertainty, that I could live without knowing… but it turns out that I don’t think I can live without _you.”_

“So the answer…” he began.

She nodded. “I know the answer now.” She opened her mouth and hoped like hell that the words would actually come: “I love you, Harry Jones.”

“Then I think,” he said hesitantly, “that this outcome might be a good one… because you drive me absolutely crazy and I’ve never wanted something so badly in my life.”

“Will you stay, then?”

“I’ll stay forever, if you’ll have me.”

She laughed, still feeling a little giddy. “Nothing lasts forever.”

“Then how about as close to forever as we can get?”

They kissed again and, for the first time since she’d set foot there, Leeds finally felt like home.

“Come on,” she said, taking him by the hand. “I have a few ideas on where we could start.”

* * *

They were so caught up in the other’s attention that they failed to notice the Time Lady watching their departure from just inside the door to the TARDIS.

“Oh dear,” she murmured.

“Are they still—” the Doctor asked from further in.

“No,” Missy interrupted. “They’re gone.” She gave them one final glance, her expression inscrutable, before stepping inside the blue box and closing the door behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure that anyone who knows anything about biology is probably cringing at all of the technobabble I attempted in this chapter. XD
> 
> TWO. TRIPS. LEFT. Hang onto your hats, everyone.
> 
> I'm still answering questions in the comments section! It's been a whole lot of fun and now I miss Harry and Jenny more than ever, since I finished writing the fic (and am in the process of editing the final chapters), so it's fantastic to have these little mini-writing prompts to work on.
> 
> As always, thank you to everyone for reading, commenting, and leaving kudos. 
> 
> Stay safe, fam! <3


	7. Trip No. 9: Bristol to Gallifrey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Setting: Six months after the events of the previous chapter

It was definitely a sign of how lonely the Doctor was feeling lately that he not only let Missy out of the vault, but even let her into the TARDIS on occasion.

Not that she minded: outside the confines of her prison, Missy realised that the Doctor had to watch her even more closely than before and the effort was visibly stressing him out. 

So, of course, she had to have _some_ fun with her new game: she wandered around his office peeking into drawers until he snapped at her to stop touching things, she pretended to be caught red-handed trying to sneak into the TARDIS unsupervised, and in general made herself look as naughty as possible until the Doctor sent her back to her room.

He always let her out again in short order anyway.

The funniest part was that she wasn’t even really trying to escape. She’d had a few opportunities, but after this long imprisoned it would be anticlimactic for her to just _leave_ without doing something really infuriating and complicated in the process. Seventy years of confinement needed a much more satisfying conclusion.

But _he_ didn’t have to know that.

The only time when it stopped being amusing and started being _tragic_ was when the Doctor heard the sound of a pair of students chattering as they passed by his office door. His expression would perk up for a fraction of a second, before fading back into a scowl.

After watching one too many performances of these tiny mood swings, Missy finally had enough. “For pity’s sake, just _call_ them. Your constant moping is interfering with my usual pastime of making you miserable.”

“I _have_ called them,” he replied testily. “They’re still in Leeds. It’s been six months. They’re obviously not coming back.”

She rolled her eyes. “You have a machine that travels in time _and space.”_

“So?”

 _“So,_ go visit them and remind them of that.”

The Doctor eyed her warily. “And leave you here unguarded?”

It was too good of an opening. “You’ll just have to hope that I didn’t sabotage the locks while you weren’t looking.” She gave him an exaggerated wink. “I’ll even spare Nardole’s life if you promise to bring me back a pretty souvenir.”

He twitched in a way that made it clear that he was fighting the urge to go double-check the vault’s security system.

“Or,” she said with feigned casualness, “you could take me with you. It would still count as guarding me, wouldn’t it?” She put a hand over one of her hearts. “I promise to behave—it would even be a nice little test of your attempts to reform me.”

She’d originally meant it as a joke, but the idea actually began to appeal to her. 

_Might not be a bad way to spend the next nine centuries…_

“Come on,” she prodded when he didn’t respond. “Going wherever you want to go, doing whatever you want to do, and if I misbehave you can always pop me back into the vault.”

“That sounds like a recipe for disaster,” he said, fussing with the framed photos around his desk.

“Sure, but when has that ever stopped you?” She planted her hands on the opposite side of the desk from him and leaned in. “Do you remember when we were young and we used to talk about all the places we were going to go once we finally made it off Gallifrey?”

The Doctor was still very deliberately not making eye contact. “Only we had our falling out before that could happen,” he said quietly.

_Oh, he’s tempted… he’s really tempted…_

“Better late than never, isn’t it?” she countered, just as softly.

When he finally met her gaze, he looked strangely hesitant… almost nervous.

“So what do you say, Doctor?” she whispered. “Can I come with you?”

_He’s so very tempted…_

But before the Doctor could respond, there was a knock on his office door. 

“The sign clearly says ‘No Office Hours’ and yet they keep trying to barge in,” he grumbled. 

As he got up to answer it, Missy took the opportunity to sit in his chair and prop her feet up on the desk.

When the Doctor opened the door, he was greeted by two familiar voices.

“Surprise!” Harry cried.

“Did you miss us?” Jenny added cheerfully.

The Doctor replied with the most obvious statement: “You’re back.” 

“For a few days, at least,” Jenny explained as the two humans walked past him into the room. “Oh, you’re here as well!” she said to Missy.

“No, I’m a very lifelike illusion,” Missy responded drily. “I’ve been brushing up on my astral projection skills.”

Harry snorted with a brief laugh.

“What are you doing here?” the Doctor asked them.

“What, we’re not allowed to come visit?” Harry protested.

Jenny gave him a slight nudge. “We’re here for a few reasons, and one of them really is that we wanted to stop by and see you—”

“And possibly save the world for old times’ sake,” Harry interjected with a grin.

“—but we’re also here to wrap up a few things in Bristol,” she continued, a little more seriously. “Harry got a teaching job in Leeds and my fellowship was extended again, so we’re packing up the rest of the stuff in his flat to take back with us.”

The Doctor’s expression fell a little at that news. “Well… that’s all very…”

“And how _is_ domestic bliss suiting you?” Missy inquired, unsure if she could bear yet another sulking episode from the Doctor without going mad (well, _more_ mad).

Jenny beamed. “We’re getting loads of writing done. Co-authored seven papers in the last three months and have another two in progress, and that’s not even counting the four I’ve done on the results of my cellular refresh experiments.” She gestured at Harry. “He’s about two-thirds of the way through his book.”

“Thesis,” he corrected her.

“Book,” she insisted. “You know it’s going to end up being a book.”

“However,” Harry continued, “we’ve yet to find time to buy a sofa.”

“Who needs a sofa?” Jenny scoffed.

“Grand,” the Doctor muttered.

Missy fought the urge to groan out loud. He really was committed to being miserable about the whole thing. “Well, if you’re not going to take them on a nearly-fatal trip to some desolate part of time and space, you could at least take them on a trip to IKEA.”

Harry broke down into full-blown snickering as the Doctor glared at her.

“Just a suggestion,” she said defensively.

“So you’re here to say goodbye.” The Doctor’s voice was flat.

“Well,” Jenny replied slowly, “we also have some news to share.” She exchanged an excited glance with Harry and they both held up their left hands.

Missy felt her stomach drop.

_Oh dear._

It took the Doctor a second to understand. “What’s wrong with your hands?” he asked.

Missy sighed audibly. “The rings,” she muttered.

The Doctor’s eyes widened. “You’re—”

“Engaged,” Harry confirmed. The look he and Jenny were giving one another was barely-disguised glee, with the kind of intensity that Missy herself tended to reserve only for fiendish plans, except that this one was surprisingly vulnerable as well. A conspiracy made by and for one another.

_Oh dear._

Normally she would have merely gagged at the reminder of the human obsession with all the different terms they came up with to fool themselves into thinking that it wasn’t just hormones running wild… but this was different. Completely different.

Because, ever since the last time she saw them, Missy had been haunted by the words she overheard them exchange:

_Without hope. Without witness. Without reward._

The same words that Missy had exchanged with the Doctor before her execution:

(True, those words were originally sent by the Doctor’s most recent wife, but Missy felt like she had made them her own.)

_“I am your friend.”_

_“Makes no difference,” he said sadly._

_“I know it doesn’t. I know I’m going to die. I have to say it, the truth. Without hope. Without witness. Without reward. I am your friend.”_

Words that ordinary little human Harry Jones _could not have known._

Which, combined with the suspicions she already held, left Missy with a single question: _What is he planning?_

Because she knew from experience, obviously, that he wouldn’t be going to all this trouble without a really good plan in the works. Getting close to the Doctor, gaining access to the TARDIS, sticking his oar in whenever he could, and then skipping town to continue the work away from the Doctor’s prying eyes… it was the kind of methodical and delightfully sinister approach that she had used herself so often over the years.

What Missy couldn’t figure out, though, was how Jenny figured into all this. The girl was smart and a magnet for chaos, a natural candidate for the Doctor’s ‘companion,’ and was obviously lonely for company. Was he using her to ensure that the Doctor would take him along?

Perhaps, but the hackneyed romance development was odd. Did Jenny initiate and force him to reciprocate in order to keep her around? No: their conversations after the mess with the Monks implied that he was the one doing the pursuing. But that didn’t mean much: he wanted her close for some reason, even if it meant being intimate and sharing a flat with her. Maybe she was in on it?

That brought to mind another possibility: he was indulging in a little extra fun. It had happened before: Lucy Saxon certainly wasn’t necessary to the Archangel project, but she was a pleasant distraction when things got too tedious.

And this one was blonde as well.

But no, he would have picked someone easier to control and to fool. Jenny wouldn’t be a good fit: she was too curious, too relentless, too clever to merely serve as a distraction.

So clever, in fact, that it brought to mind an alternative possibility… 

_Oh dear._

If it were true, it would explain so many things.

_Oh, this could get very complicated._

But Missy decided to hold off on expressing any of these suspicions to the Doctor. This might be information that she could use to her advantage.

“Congratulations,” she managed to say. She got up from the chair and walked over to get a better look at them.

“Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?” the Doctor demanded of them.

“Get married?” Jenny asked.

 _“You’ve_ been married before,” Missy accused him. _“Several_ times.”

“Not that,” the Doctor said, annoyed. “Engaged. Why not have it done already?”

“We wanted you to be there,” Jenny explained. “You’re the reason we’re together, after all: we’d never have gotten to this point if we hadn’t travelled in the TARDIS. Besides…” She looked briefly embarrassed. “We don’t really know anyone else. There’s no family we could invite and we don’t have much of a social circle.”

Missy pressed her lips together. _How convenient._

“Plus, we need witnesses,” Harry pointed out, “and we had to wait 29 days after giving notice before we could do it anyway.”

“And since Harry’s tenancy agreement for his old flat isn’t up for another month, he still has residency in Bristol, so we decided to register here instead.”

“It’ll be 29 days as of tomorrow,” he said with a grin. “So… do you have plans?”

 _How_ _very_ _convenient,_ Missy nearly said out loud.

The Doctor made a bit of a show of conceding to their request: “I suppose I could find the time.”

Jenny was beaming. “Brilliant!”

“Really, thank you,” Harry added, then turned to Missy. “You’re invited too, if the Doctor will give you a day pass or something.”

Missy gestured at her surroundings. “He let me get this far, didn’t he?”

“Nardole as well, if he’s around,” Jenny informed the Doctor.

“A Grumpy Troll, an Egg Man, and the Queen of Evil,” Missy snorted. “You two really need to learn how to make friends.”

Jenny shrugged cheerfully. “I’m sure we’ll get around to it at some point.”

“We keep getting distracted,” Harry confessed, slipping an arm around her waist.

“He once lost a shoe somewhere in our flat and couldn’t leave for almost a week till he found it,” Jenny said, leaning into his embrace.

“I’m still not convinced that she didn’t hide it herself to keep me homebound,” he joked.

“I’m too busy making my own messes to make any of yours.”

“Liar,” he murmured, then kissed her.

“Is this what we have to look forward to tomorrow?” the Doctor groaned.

“How the hell did _your_ last wedding go?” Missy asked him, annoyed.

“She killed me and also didn’t kill me, and then reality broke and all of time happened at once, and at some point during all that an argument got massively out of hand and we got married.”

Missy couldn’t help feeling a little resentful. _“I_ try to murder you and you get all huffy about it, but when _she_ does it you _marry_ her?”

He blinked in surprise and it was only then that Missy realised that she might have inadvertently implied something very different from what she had intended to say.

Fortunately for both of them, Jenny interrupted. “Any chance we could raid your wardrobe?” she asked the Doctor with a wicked grin.

He hastily returned to his usual grumpy demeanor. “I’m not a bridal shop.”

Harry snorted. “If you think she’s going to show up in white lace, you obviously haven’t been paying attention,” he pointed out.

“I’m really just in it for the jackets,” she agreed.

“You’re already imposing on my—” the Doctor complained, but Jenny was already halfway inside the TARDIS.

“Still the fifth door on the left past the bins?” she called over her shoulder as she ran.

“Of all the bloody nuisances…” he grumbled as he stormed in after her.

Harry moved as if to follow them, but Missy held up a hand to stop him.

“Just a moment, _Harry Jones,”_ she said. “I was hoping we could have a few words first.”

She guided him over to the wall furthest away from the TARDIS, checked to make sure that Nardole wasn’t lurking around somewhere, and then leaned in close. “All right,” she said quietly. “I know it’s you, so you can quit pretending. I’m not going to interfere, I just want to know what you’re planning.”

Harry looked at her like she had started speaking German. “I’m planning… a wedding?”

Missy rolled her eyes. “There’s no need to play dumb. It’s _me,_ remember? And if you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”

“What?” 

He was really committing to the bit, apparently.

“Obviously I’m not about to give you away,” she assured him. “Whatever you've got in the works for old Eyebrows is probably good enough to eat popcorn to, but you could at least give me a warning first so I can duck when necessary. Or do we really not trust ourselves?”

Harry shook his head, doing his best to back away. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, no one’s listening in!” she snapped. “Did you think I hadn’t checked on that first? You don’t need to maintain your cover with me: I already know who you really are.”

“Whoever you think I am,” he insisted, “you’re mistaken.”

Missy knew what a good liar she was, but she also knew herself well enough to know when she _wasn’t_ lying…

And unless her future self had _really_ levelled up in that area, she was pretty sure that he was telling the truth.

Or at least _thought_ that he was telling the truth.

_Oh, you have got to be kidding me._

“I should go see what Jenny’s—” Harry started to say, but was cut off with an _oof_ when Missy put a hand on his chest and slammed him back into the wall.

Underneath her hand, she could feel the rhythm of a single human heart beating.

_Oh, of all the idiotic moves you could make—_

“Did you miss the bit just now where I mentioned that I was _getting married?”_ sputtered a now-justifiably-alarmed Harry Jones. “I don’t know _how_ you could have interpreted that as an invitation to feel me up!”

“Have you got a fob watch somewhere?” she demanded, still pinning him to the wall. “One that you’ve never thought to open? One that you can’t remember getting? I can help you with your problem but you’ve got to tell me where it is!”

Harry finally managed to wriggle free and make a break for the TARDIS. With one last desperate lunge, Missy clamped her hand around his left wrist—

And collapsed in agony as the feeling of an inferno roared through her head.

The screams of millions echoed in her ears and she could see civilisations crumbling under her feet.

She returned to her senses at the sound of the Doctor bellowing at her: “What is _wrong_ with you?”

“Something’s wrong with _him,”_ she managed to gasp out. “He’s got something on him, I don’t know what it is, but when I touched it—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be touching things that aren’t yours, did you ever think of that?”

Missy tried to piece together what had happened right before the psychic explosion she had experienced: _plan—wall—heart—lunge—wrist—_

“His wrist!” she cried, finally sitting up enough to look the Doctor in the eye. “Check what he’s got on his left wrist,” she pleaded.

“Harry, what happened?” Jenny had left the TARDIS as well and had wrapped the still-shaken Harry in a hug.

“I should just put you back in the vault,” the Doctor said sadly.

“Please, Doctor, just _check,”_ Missy implored him. “Something’s happened, something important—you can lock me up again after but please do this one thing for me…”

She was on her knees and begging and she hated herself for it, but whatever was happening had already struck enough blows to her dignity that she almost didn’t mind taking a few more.

It was Harry who answered instead of the Doctor. “It’s just a wristwatch,” he said, bewildered, as he stepped out of Jenny’s embrace. “If you want to see it so badly, here you go.” 

Missy blinked at the sight of an item in Harry’s outstretched hand. It was as if she was having trouble…

“Doctor,” she said quietly, “there’s a perception filter on it.”

Unexpectedly, Harry turned to Jenny. “Was this some plot to force me to get a new watch?” he asked with a note of amusement in his tone. 

“No!” Jenny objected, then glared at Missy; her expression was still one of a barely-restrained temper. “I don’t know _what_ this is.”

“Look at it, Doctor,” Missy insisted.

Warily, the Doctor reached out and took the watch. He sighed impatiently. “Well, it didn’t send _me_ barking mad,” he pointed out.

“Because it’s not _for_ you,” she said icily.

_He’s apparently forgotten about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect: you can’t make physical contact with another version of yourself without a massive backlash._

“But you can still sense the psychic energy around it, can’t you?” she asked.

Still watching her with distrust out of the corner of his eye, the Doctor got out his sonic shades and examined what Missy was only now noticing was a pretty gaudy accessory. “How long have you had this?” the Doctor asked Harry.

The young man shrugged. “Ages.”

“I think he might be more in love with it than he is with me sometimes,” Jenny joked. “He almost never takes it off.”

Missy watched the Doctor’s expression grow more suspicious. “You’re starting to get the idea, aren’t you?” she asked him in a low voice.

“There doesn’t seem to be a way to open it,” he murmured, “but it’s broadcasting something: a very tiny sliver of information.” He turned to Harry. “Jones, have you ever tried to take this watch apart?”

Harry just looked puzzled. “Why would I?”

“Can you try it now?”

Missy fought the urge to roll her eyes. The Doctor still hadn’t picked up on her hints about Harry’s true identity.

_Denial can certainly make a person dense, I suppose, and there’s no one who does that better than the Doctor._

“Are you saying I’ve got an alien watch or something?” he asked as the Doctor returned it to him.

Jenny’s eyes lit up. “Can _I_ try opening it?”

“Be my guest,” Harry said, handing it over. “You’re the one carrying at least two screwdrivers on you at any given time, not me.”

“No,” the Doctor said, more sharply than he had probably intended. “Jones is the one who has to do it.”

After giving both Time Lords a wary look, Harry took the watch back from Jenny, as well as the Swiss army knife she handed him, and attempted to pry off the back of the watch.

Missy braced herself for the light, the voices, and the inevitable outburst.

_Letting him stand between you and the TARDIS was a foolish mistake, Doctor._

But after another few seconds of trying, Harry abandoned the attempt. “Looks like it’s indestructible,” he said, smirking at Jenny. “Too bad.”

The Doctor approached them and took the watch away from Harry. “It’s still transmitting,” he said, heading into the TARDIS. “I want to check one more thing.”

Missy and the two humans _(two for the moment,_ she reminded herself) followed the Doctor inside. As she suspected, he planned to hook it up to the ship’s telepathic circuits.

“I knew there was something wrong with that watch,” Jenny said, giving Harry a gentle elbow to the ribs. 

“You just thought it was ugly,” he objected, “which is frankly a bit rich considering _your_ sense of fashion.”

Jenny’s features scrunched up in indignation. “Excuse me? _My_ sense of fashion?”

He gave her a sly grin. “As far as I can tell, you assemble your wardrobe by flinging yourself at the nearest pieces of fabric and hoping for the best.”

She snorted. “Well, now you’ve ruined the surprise for what I planned to wear to the wedding.”

“I can’t tell if it’s a biodata module,” the Doctor said, his voice increasingly tense. His focus kept shifting between the TARDIS controls, the watch, and its owner. “But the signal…” He double-checked the monitor. “It's coordinates.”

“What the hell are coordinates doing inside my _watch?”_ Harry asked. His incredulity was being slowly tempered by a hint of fear.

Missy felt her own anxiety growing. “Am I correct in assuming that they’re coordinates in space and time?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jenny take Harry’s hand in hers, tightly enough that her knuckles began to turn white. For his part, Harry didn’t give any sign of discomfort from it.

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “Very specific coordinates, in fact.”

“Let’s check it out, then,” Jenny insisted. Before the Doctor could protest, she pointed out: “Even if it’s some kind of trap, we’ve got two Time Lords and two very clever humans. If we can’t handle it, no one can.”

_That roll call is about to change very soon, I suspect._

Missy knew what it was like to have a plan fall apart: that nagging itch of something forgotten, the hairs standing up on the back of the neck right before the double-cross, the shiver of being watched by an unseen enemy approaching, that sensation of _no no don’t do this not now…_

She felt all of those things at that very moment.

“Besides,” Harry said, the resolve returning to his voice, “it’s my bloody watch. I have a right to know what’s in it.”

“You just want it back, don’t you?” Jenny teased him.

“It would admittedly be a nice bonus,” he admitted, and then kissed her on the cheek.

Missy went to close the door to the TARDIS, still feeling as though she was standing on the precipice of calamity.

* * *

“String and paste, I swear…” the Doctor heard Missy mutter as the TARDIS once again shook violently enough to nearly knock them all off their feet.

“It’s not the TARDIS’s fault,” he protested, hoping like hell that it was true. Another tremor rocked the ship and his fingers tightened on the console. “It’s like it’s trying to break through something in the Vortex…”

The identity of their probable destination apparently hit him at the same time that it occurred to Missy, because they immediately locked eyes with a horrible premonition of dread.

With a final jolt, the TARDIS made it to the other side, rematerialising with a wheeze that somehow sounded a little exhausted.

The Doctor hesitantly opened the door—

On the other side of it was death.

The great domes over the Citadel were smashed to pieces and its buildings were reduced to rubble. Beyond the city, the fields of grass were now nothing but dust. There was an eerie silence in the air: one that confirmed what his eyes were telling him: there was no longer anything alive on Gallifrey.

And scattered all over were the fallen remains of millions of Cybermen.

“We always assumed it would be the Daleks,” Missy murmured from beside him. “Apparently we picked the wrong tin cans.” He would have snapped at her for being insensitive, but the tremor in her voice revealed that she was attempting to cope with this horror the only way she knew how.

Behind them, Harry and Jenny were apparently trying to see over his shoulder. “This is…” Jenny breathed in horror. “Where _are_ we?”

“Gallifrey,” the Doctor answered, feeling the crack in his voice as he spoke its name.

_All the things that I did, and now it’s gone. Everything’s gone. There’s nothing here. There’s nothing left._

“Our home planet,” Missy clarified. Appearing to steel herself, she exited the TARDIS. With every step, a cloud of dust drifted around her.

“What happened?” Harry asked.

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” the Doctor said, bracing himself as well. 

The first step was the hardest: a kind of slipperiness underneath the soles of his shoes, confirming what he already knew: there was no organic life of any kind. It had all turned to ash.

Having followed him out, Harry coughed briefly as the clouds around them thickened. “Did those robots do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“But that wouldn’t explain why they’re all destroyed as well,” Jenny pointed out.

 _"I know,”_ the Doctor growled impatiently. 

That part actually bothered him quite a bit. The Cybermen were obsessed with ‘upgrading’ themselves and others. They were built to survive no matter what.

Was it a new kind of weapon that the Cybermen had deployed? Or had they simply fulfilled their purpose and shut down for some reason?

Or had some desperate Time Lord destroyed Gallifrey to make sure that the Cybermen shared their fate?

He shuddered. 

_Is_ _that_ _who Harry is? A survivor of the final battle here? Why would he come to Bristol to hide?_

_What if—_

“Hold on a moment,” Missy said, interrupting his anxious spiral. She picked up the head of a nearby Cyberman and tilted it to one side, spilling a shower of dust onto the ground.

“Whatever destroyed things here,” she said, “also destroyed the Cybermen. Or at least the most interesting bits: their organic components.”

“Organic components?” Harry asked.

“Human bodies.” She shielded her eyes as she looked at the shattered city in the distance. “Hmm, that’s another odd thing.”

The Doctor knew he wasn’t going to like what she was about to say. “What?”

“How do the Cybermen destroy things?” Missy asked, then answered her own question: “By shooting those little lasers of theirs. So tell me, Doctor, does the damage to the Citadel look anything like that?”

She was right, the Doctor realised. The Citadel looked like it had been nuked into rubble, but not by Cybermen.

Her inquiry continued: “And do you see any signs of damage on these Cybermen?”

The Doctor felt his stomach plummet.

Jenny and Harry, for their part, were watching the whole thing in horrified silence.

“If I were to guess,” Missy concluded, “I’d say that three disasters happened in sequence: something destroyed the Citadel and probably quite a bit of the rest of Gallifrey, then the Cybermen showed up, and then a separate thing destroyed all organic life on the planet, including the Cybermen themselves. Someone had a very busy day.”

“I’ll need to do a scan,” the Doctor said, and returned to the TARDIS, feeling like he was in a daze.

“Come on, there’s nothing more to see out here,” Missy said, ushering the other two inside as well.

“Keep the door open,” he told her. “I might have to take a few samples.”

He overheard Missy mutter something under her breath about who was going to be responsible for hoovering up the mess afterwards.

As he touched the console, an image flickered to life: a life-sized projection at the top of the stairs, towering over them all.

It was Harry.

Harry Jones, but a very different version of him: one dressed in a long plaid coat over a matching vest and ankle-length trousers… and with a haunted expression on his face.

 _“Geo-activated,”_ he said softly.

Harry’s eyes widened. “Why does he look like me?”

 _“If you’re seeing this,”_ his duplicate continued, _“you’ve been to Gallifrey. When I said someone did that,”_ the look of pain in his eyes intensified, _“obviously I meant… I did.”_

The Doctor froze. It _had_ been the act of a single desperate Time Lord.

The pained expression grew into something more furious, more unstable. _“I had to make them pay for what I discovered. They lied to us, the founding fathers of Gallifrey. Everything we were told was a lie.”_

“Wait… this _wasn’t_ about the Cybermen?” Jenny said, her face going pale.

“Doctor, please,” Harry begged. _“Why does he look like me?”_

But the Doctor couldn’t find a way to respond. It wasn’t the Cybermen: Gallifrey was destroyed for no other reason than one person’s rage.

One particular person. The only person it ever could have been.

_“We are not who we think, you or I. The whole existence of our species: built on the lie of the Timeless Child.”_

The Doctor clutched at this head as a series of strange voices and images surfaced: a tower, a cliff, and whisper after whisper: _The Timeless Child._

Beside him, he could hear Missy cry out as well.

 _“Do you see it?”_ the wounded version of Harry asked. _“It’s buried deep in all our memories. In our identity. I’d tell you more, but…”_ His features twisted in bitter fury. _“But why would I make it easy for you? It wasn’t for me.”_

The image vanished, leaving only silence behind.

If the Doctor hadn’t already figured out who the message was from, those final lines would have confirmed it without a doubt. There was only one person who had ever shown the Doctor that kind of cruelty and spite.

And the Master had been ‘Harry Jones’ this entire time.

“Who was that?” Jenny asked. “Why did he say…” She glanced at Harry, whose expression was contorted in terror. “Why does he…?”

She wasn’t the only one looking at him: a red mist began to descend over the Doctor’s vision as he stared at the face of the person who he should have known all along was his oldest enemy.

_Gone… they’re all gone… but I was just here, wasn’t I? I came back after so long and everyone was alive and being stuffy and ridiculous as usual, only now they’re gone again and it’s all the fault of…_

“It was you…” the Doctor whispered, advancing on him. “You were the one, all along—after everything I did to end the war, it was _you…”_ He could feel his stomach heave. “What have you done?”

It took Harry—no, _not_ Harry, not really—a moment to realise that the Doctor was talking to him. “Who was that?” he asked, backing away in the direction of the TARDIS door while trembling in fear.

 _No, he’s not afraid, he’s beyond that kind of thing, he’s just playing wounded to throw me off, to fool me into looking the other way, like he always_ _always_ _does, after every second chance and benefit of the doubt, but this is beyond what even I thought he was capable of—_

“What did you do?” the Doctor rasped. He rushed at Harry—no, _not_ Harry, his mind insisted—grabbed him by the collar, and slammed him into the ground outside. _“What did you do?”_

“Doctor, _stop!”_ Jenny had practically tackled him from behind, trying to pull him off of the terrified-looking man in the dust. “This isn’t his fault!”

_That poor girl: she doesn’t know the real him, she doesn’t know what he’s capable of, she’s not to blame for this…_

But the Doctor’s brain still wouldn’t register what was happening or who anyone was, just reacting on instinct to the horrors around him. He jerked his arm back to throw her off but got his fingers tangled in her necklace—

And then reeled away with a cry of agony as everything in his mind got _so loud_ and _so sharp._

All three of them were on the ground now, with Jenny scrambling to Harry’s side to hold him in her arms…

Leaving behind a small silver locket on a broken chain lying in the barren soil.

“Ah,” Missy murmured, looking down at it as well, “I was afraid of that.”

Even with the shock, the Doctor couldn’t help feeling that well of rage again: _After all the time I’ve spent with Missy, trying to help her find her way out of the dark, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference because she’ll one day become the person who did_ _this_ _…_

He reined in his fury when her words caught up with him. “You knew?”

“Suspected.” She glanced at Jenny with an expression that was almost fond. “Someone comes along _that_ brilliant and _that_ irritating, with an inexplicable knack for navigating the death trap you call a TARDIS, who _built_ a sonic screwdriver despite it being an utterly useless tool, and calls herself _Jenny Smith?_ Neither of us are subtle, Doctor.” She smirked. “Welcome to the sisterhood, by the way.”

He shook his head. “They can’t be.”

“Apparently they can. And apparently they’re both deranged enough to Chameleon Arch themselves into humans and trick you into babysitting them.”

He watched as Jenny placed a hand on the side of Harry’s face and leaned in until their foreheads were pressed together, murmuring what were probably reassuring words.

The Doctor said it again: “They can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re…”

_Because we would never be that gentle with one another._

But Jenny’s tenderness was reserved for only one person. “What is _wrong_ with you?” she shouted, getting to her feet and placing herself between Harry and the Doctor’s wrath. “Whoever that was in the recording, that was an _illusion!_ That wasn’t actually Harry!”

The look of ferocity on Jenny’s face as she stared him down was enough to make the Doctor’s chest hurt even more than it already did.

_That’s exactly what I would have done, if there was a danger to someone I…_

_But why him? Why_ _this_ _?_

“You’re right,” Missy said, “and you’re also wrong.”

“You are not who you think,” the Doctor said through the bitter ache. “Either of you.”

“Then who are we?” Jenny demanded.

But the Doctor couldn’t bring himself to say it.

_They can’t be._

“You’re us,” Missy answered bluntly.

“What do you mean? We’re Time Lords?”

“Even more than that: you’re _us._ The Doctor and me. You’re our future selves.”

Jenny’s expression was one of total disbelief. “How is that possible?”

“Remember what I once told the two of you about regeneration?” Missy asked. “New face, new body… sometimes even a new gender.” She examined Harry a little more closely. “Very nice eyelashes. I’ll look forward to that.”

Harry looked aghast. “You think I’m… you?”

“That is exactly what I’ve been trying to get through your thick heads, yes. Guess I get to go back to calling myself the Master. Convenient. And you,” she said with a smirk at the Doctor, “get to blonde again. Shame: I know how badly you wanted to be ginger.”

“Doctor,” Jenny said, “you don’t _believe_ her, do you?”

He had never been so grateful for Missy’s ability to monologue regardless of the circumstances.

“There is a piece of technology called a Chameleon Arch,” she explained. “It can rewrite a Time Lord’s biology to transform them into a different species. Humans are usually the easiest to impersonate. We’ve both used them on occasion when we needed to hide… and it seems that we’ve done it again.”

“That’s not proof!” Jenny shouted, her voice growing increasingly panicked. “Recordings can be falsified—someone is out there impersonating Harry and your first reaction is that we’re both secretly _you?_ Do you realise how ridiculous that sounds?”

“Ridiculous, yes,” the Doctor admitted. “But it’s also true. The two of you coming to Bristol wasn’t a coincidence: you knew that we would be here and you did everything you could in order to get my attention. You both knew things that you couldn’t possibly have known, done things that normal humans couldn’t possibly have done—”

“Because we’re—”

“Clever,” Missy finished her sentence. “Yes, you keep saying that.” She looked over at Harry, who was slowly rising to his feet. “Tell me, Mister Jones: when you did that messy confession of feelings to young Miss Smith here, what were the words that you used?”

“Why does that matter?” he demanded.

“Come on, you have to remember what you said, it was probably quite the touching moment. ‘Without hope…’”

“Without witness,” he said hesitantly.

“Without reward,” the Doctor finished, feeling an old wound reopening in his hearts. “Those exact words…”

“We know those words,” Missy said, “because we spoke them.”

“That doesn’t mean…” Jenny began, but trailed off when she turned and saw the shattered expression on Harry’s face. She glared at the Doctor. “How could you possibly believe that we’re not ourselves?”

The Doctor felt his hearts breaking. “When you fixed my sight,” he explained, “you triggered a small localised regeneration. That’s why the colour changed to match yours. You’re not just a future regeneration of me: you’re my _next_ regeneration.”

“That’s impossible. I know my life. I know…” Desperation filled her voice. “I know who I am.”

“Jenny—”

“I remember my home! I remember growing up!”

“Because that’s one of the ways the Arch disguises people: it creates memories of a whole life. Tell me,” he asked, thinking back to the time when he used it to hide from the Family of Blood, “have you noticed any differences between your life before you arrived at St. Luke’s and everything that’s happened since?”

“Well obviously,” she said, irritated despite visibly trembling. “I met a time-travelling alien, of course that would upend things a bit!”

“Before that,” he pressed her. “When you first got here, when you first met Harry—”

At the sound of his name (no, not _his_ name), Harry made a noise that was halfway between a gasp and a sob. 

“I noticed,” he said shakily. “I thought to myself: it was like my life wasn’t real until I met you, Jenny. And now… I’m starting to think that it wasn’t. Like maybe _I’m_ not real.”

“We _are_ real!” Jenny snapped. “All of this is… it’s just coincidences. You can’t prove this.”

“We can, though,” Missy said. She bent down and picked up the locket. “This is a biodata module. It holds the memories of your real life—”

“This _is_ our real life!” she growled through clenched teeth.

“—and opening it will change you back.”

Jenny’s eyes widened in terror as Missy attempted to open the locket. “No!” she cried.

But, watching Missy struggle with the piece of jewelry, the Doctor knew that it wasn’t going to open.

_Interesting._

“Wait, wait, wait… _wait_ a minute…” Missy hissed to what was either herself or the locket. She hurried into the TARDIS and dropped the locket onto the console. “Doctor, I’m going to need a hand with this.”

“What is it?” he asked as he followed her into the TARDIS.

“Even as a necklace, you’re surprisingly chatty,” she grumbled. “I figured it might be easier to play the message for the whole class.”

By the time Jenny and Harry joined them inside, the Doctor had (with Missy’s assistance, as he couldn’t risk touching it again) connected it to the telepathic circuits.

There was no image to accompany the message, but the slightly blurry voice was still clearly recognisable as belonging to Jenny Smith:

_“Contact. If you’re hearing this, it means that you just realised you couldn’t open the locket. Don’t bother replying, by the way: what you’re hearing is sort of a psychic voicemail.”_

Her voice was extremely smug, which was a rather strong indicator of who she had recorded the message for.

_“You shouldn’t leave things like Chameleon Arches lying about like that, you know. People can get up to all sorts of mischief if left alone with one.”_

The Jenny that was standing in the TARDIS could barely speak above a whisper. “No…”

 _“So here’s_ _my_ _end of the deal: the locket will open after ten trips in the TARDIS. Until then, you’re stuck with your new human companion, Jenny Smith.”_

“That… that isn’t…” She started shaking.

_“I’ll still be travelling with you… I just won’t have to be there for it. Good news for you, though: she probably won’t try to escape or foil your plans. Won’t that be convenient?”_

Harry grabbed her in a fierce hug, obviously doing his best to keep her calm.

_“Of course, if you get sick of her and would rather be taunting me instead, all you have to do is take those ten trips very quickly… but then our deal will be fulfilled. So choose wisely—I suppose there’s a first time for everything.”_

“Well, you certainly haven’t gotten less rude,” Missy muttered, keeping her voice down so that only the Doctor could hear her.

“Ten trips,” the Doctor said to himself. “How many trips has it been?” He paced back and forth. 

“There’s this one,” Jenny counted—having a question with a concrete answer was apparently enough for her to regain some of her composure and step out of Harry’s arms, though she still kept a tight grip on his hand. “The one we took with Missy to rescue you in Leeds, the trip to Chasm Forge and back again, the trip to 1814 and back again, and the trip to the human colony and back again.”

“That’s eight,” Harry said with obvious relief. “We can return to Earth and go back to our lives. We’ll stay ourselves.”

“Nine trips,” Missy said quietly. “They had to get to Bristol to begin with.” She gestured at where Harry’s wristwatch still lay on the console. “His is probably set to open when hers does rather than after ten trips. In case we got separated.”

“Don’t say ‘we,’” Jenny snapped. “We’re not _you.”_

“You will be soon,” she countered. “Once we leave here, that locket opens and I’ll have to deal with _two_ Doctors at once.”

For a moment, the Doctor worried that Jenny might actually take a swing at Missy.

_I wouldn’t blame her, I suppose._

But she managed to rein in her temper. He suspected that Harry’s presence had something to do with it.

“Why would we turn ourselves into humans?” she finally asked.

Missy looked amused. “Well, if your little message is anything to go by, it was for our usual reason: pure spite.”

“What?”

She gave Jenny a sympathetic look. “Dearie, I know you don’t remember, so I’ll put it this way: our relationship is thousands of years old and far too complex to describe in mere words. It has a body count, and some of those bodies are even our own: I’ve killed you at least once, and I think you’ve gotten me, what… twice?” She turned to the Doctor for confirmation, which he refused to provide. “Or maybe it was just the once, that time in San Francisco. Oh, but I suppose my recent execution might have technically counted.”

“That’s horrible.” Both Jenny and Harry looked disgusted.

Missy shrugged. “In a way, you’re what we were back when we met at the Academy: bitter rivals and even more bitter friends. Unstoppable when we stood on the same side, but positively lethal when we were in opposition. There is, and has never been, such a thing as ‘casual’ between us. It’s all or nothing.”

For some reason, Jenny’s eyes widened just a little.

“So believe me when I say that the notion of me coercing you into a little field trip across the cosmos, with you turning yourself into a human so that you wouldn’t have to pay attention to it, followed by me turning myself into one as well out of sheer pettiness is _absolutely_ on-brand for the both of us,” Missy concluded.

“Then how did we end up together?” Harry demanded. “Why aren’t _we_ acting like that? Doctor?”

The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t know. I think it’s possible that you grew a conscience.”

“After blasting a world into rubble, of course,” Missy added. “Not sure how you’d come back from that but, who knows, perhaps miracles do happen.” She looked at the Doctor. “It seems that your reform efforts didn’t pan out after all.”

“There has to be a way to leave here without using the TARDIS,” Jenny said frantically, beginning to pace in a way that the Doctor realised mirrored his own movements. “Some other way that Harry and I could travel. This is an advanced civilisation—there must be _something_ here we could adapt!”

“This isn’t just another world,” the Doctor said. He had been thinking of solutions too, even if it was technically against his own self-interests, but it always came back to this: “We’re in another dimension, and Gallifrey is the only planet here. The TARDIS barely made it through in one piece. It’s the only way in or out.”

“That can’t be right!” Jenny insisted. “You think of clever solutions all the time! You never give up when there’s only two choices: you find another way! You always find another way!”

The Doctor flinched. “There is no other way. You and I are apparently too clever for our own good: we created a scenario that we can’t wiggle our way out of.”

“‘We’— _we_ are _not_ the same!”

“As I keep saying,” Missy interjected, “you will be soon.”

Jenny’s eyes lit up with furious scorn. “So one trip,” she hissed at the Doctor, “and then I turn back into you? A callous bitter old man who would rather die than acknowledge that he needs anything or anyone? Why would I _ever_ want to be _you?”_

The Doctor had come face to face with several of his other regenerations, but none of them had despised him quite like this.

It was surprisingly painful.

“And I probably don’t even need to explain why, but I’ll do it anyway,” Harry said to Missy. “You’re so wrapped up in your own anger and pain that you’d rather pretend that it’s all a stupid game rather than face the truth about anything you’ve done.” His face twisted in a bitter snarl eerily similar to the version of him in the recording. “You don’t even think of yourself as real—so why should I believe that you’re more real than I am? Why do _you_ get to be here while _I’m_ doomed to vanish?”

He stormed out of the TARDIS.

“Where is he going?” the Doctor sighed.

“Away from the people who want to murder him,” Jenny snapped. She followed him out the door.

The TARDIS had landed on a high outcropping overlooking the devastation of the Citadel. When the Doctor joined them outside, he realised with a stab of anxiety just how close Harry was standing to the edge.

But instead of doing what the Doctor had feared, Harry sat down in the dust and put his head in his hands.

“I’m not going back,” the Doctor overheard him say to Jenny, who had sat down next to him. “I can’t turn back into him—I _won’t._ I’d rather die of starvation here than become the person who did _this.”_

Jenny was silent for a time, and then put her arm around him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Then I’m staying here with you.”

“Jenny, no—”

“Either way, we’re going to die, aren’t we? At least this way we’d do it as ourselves, on our own terms.”

The Doctor began calculating how difficult it would be for him and Missy to grab their future selves and drag them back into the TARDIS. 

In a way, he could understand their fear, but this wasn’t the solution.

“Please,” Harry whispered. “Please don’t. I almost lost you… I couldn’t bear doing that again.”

She took a deep breath. “Then you don’t get to stay here either,” she said firmly.

“We’ve met the people we used to be,” he pleaded. “For all his faults, the Doctor is a good person—”

The Doctor heartily disagreed with that assessment, but opted not to interrupt to argue the point.

“—but Missy… we don’t even know half the things she’s done, even before she destroyed this world. Someone like that… I could harm so many people if I went back to being that. The universe needs the Doctor. It doesn’t need me.”

“Don’t say that,” Jenny replied fiercely. “The man in the recording isn’t you. No matter who you used to be, _you’re_ Harry Jones, and the universe _does_ need you.” Her arm tightened around him. “Just like I need you.”

“Well, the universe had better brace itself for disappointment,” he said ruefully. 

“Whatever happens,” she said softly, her head still resting on his shoulder, “we do it together.”

He tilted her chin up and kissed her. “I was going to say that you were the best thing to ever happen to me, but it turns out that you may have been the _only_ thing to ever happen to me.”

“Still the best, though,” she said with a smirk.

The levity faded quickly. “I was really looking forward to what was going to happen next,” he said quietly.

“I know. Me too.”

“All of those tomorrows that we were supposed to have together…” His shoulders shuddered in what the Doctor realised was a sob. “I wanted them so badly.”

Jenny sounded like she was holding back tears of her own. “So did I. We were going to be brilliant.”

They kissed again.

The Doctor contemplated going back inside and leaving them alone. He felt like an intruder, but he was also still worried about the two of them doing something rash in an effort to escape their grief.

_Well, escaping grief is something I’m rather good at._

_She comes by it honestly, I suppose._

Before the Doctor could make a decision, however, Harry turned around to face him.

“Will they remember?” Harry asked. “Will they remember being us?”

“Yes.”

“Could they change back?”

“Yes.” He steeled himself before saying the next part: “But they won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would be a lie.”

“We are _not_ a _lie!”_ Jenny screamed. “When you talk about ‘it,’ you’re talking about _us,_ and we are not some game that you’re playing! We are _real people!_ Maybe we didn’t exist for as long as we thought we did, but the things we did and felt _happened._ They _mattered._ We’re real people, and damned good ones at that! We—” Her voice broke, and soon the rest of her crumbled into desperate sobs.

“I don’t want to go,” she wept into Harry’s shoulder.

The Doctor remembered those words. He remembered saying those words right before he regenerated. He remembered feeling so scared, not knowing what was going to happen to him or who he would become, knowing only that his entire world was going to vanish in the span of an instant and someone entirely new would be there in his place.

That terrifying moment of dying and being born at the same time.

At least Time Lords grew up knowing that this would happen, the way it had happened to every Gallifreyan since the very beginning of their species. They hadn’t known it any other way.

But for two people who thought they were human, of course it would feel like a permanent death.

He wanted to help them… but there was nothing he could do.

“I’m sorry,” was all the Doctor knew how to say. “I’m so sorry.”

“Could we…” Jenny began, but had to take another moment to pull herself together. “Could we stay here just a little longer?”

“How long?”

“Till tomorrow.”

The Doctor hesitated. The delay might only make things worse for them.

“One last night together,” she pleaded. “That’s all I ask. Just a few hours to say goodbye.”

“One night,” he nodded, trying to fight off the discomfort he felt at the idea of what they would probably end up doing with those few hours. “Missy and I can make ourselves scarce for a little while—”

“I don’t want to go back in there,” Harry said sharply. “Not until we have to. I’d rather spend the night out here than spend it in the place where we’re going to die.”

“It gets windy on Gallifrey after dark. You’ll choke on the dust if you stay out here.”

“You can extend the TARDIS’s shields,” Jenny reminded him, “like you did when we first arrived at Chasm Forge.”

Looking at the two of them, it was difficult for the Doctor to remember that they were actually _older_ than he was. They looked so young right now.

And he felt so incredibly tired and sad and helpless.

Well, at least he could do this for them.

“All right,” he said. “Just… just tell me what you need. I’ll do my best.”

And, as usual, it didn’t feel like enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have much more to say other than: AAAAAANGST
> 
> Oh, and THANK YOU to everyone for the fantastic responses. They make my day.
> 
> I'm still answering questions in the comments and am excited to do more, especially if people have questions about what our two Disaster Nerds have been up to since they moved to Leeds.
> 
> I wrote a little something yesterday: a theoretical version of Series 13 in which I get to indulge in my need for More Appearances By The Master, Dark!Doctor trauma, Bodyswapping, and Jodie-Whittaker-as-the-Master. Check it out if that sounds interesting!
> 
> Two chapters left...
> 
> Stay safe, fam! <3


	8. Trip No. 10: Gallifrey to Bristol

Harry watched the sun set on a ruined world.

_This is a nightmare._

_I can’t imagine anything worse: my whole life was a lie. I don’t belong to myself. Harry Jones was just the dream of a sick and broken man._

_One more trip in the TARDIS and a monster with my face kills me._

_One more trip in the TARDIS and Jenny dies. We both die… and those two squabbling bitter_ _children_ _take our places._

_I have to make these last few hours count but I don’t know what to do. I thought we had more time together. I thought that this was only the beginning._

_But I guess we get what everyone gets: the rest of our lives. Nothing more._

_The Doctor and Missy said that we weren’t real… but I can’t imagine anything more real than this._

_I can’t imagine being someone who would destroy a world. I can’t imagine being someone who would do any of the things that he did._

_I can’t imagine being someone who isn’t madly in love with Jenny Smith._

In the midst of a world of confusion, something about her had always made Harry feel so certain, even when they were on opposite sides of an argument. 

He remembered Missy’s words from earlier: _‘Unstoppable when we stood on the same side, but positively lethal when we were in opposition.’_

_How could it have gone so horribly wrong for them when it was so easy for us?_

“It’s not sleeping bags,” Jenny said as she exited the TARDIS with a load of blankets in her arms, “but it’ll do.” She set them on the ground. “I’m not sure where he got all these quilts.”

“Maybe he made them himself. Who knows what hobbies he’s picked up over the years?” Harry helped her spread them out on the ground, rolled one up to serve as a shared pillow, and then crawled under the topmost quilt with her.

They curled up together and watched the sky above them fade from dusk into night. 

“It’s a warm night,” he observed out loud. “Nice weather for camping.”

“Do you think any other species does this?”

“Does what?” He began running his fingers idly through her hair.

“Camping. It’s an odd thing to do, when you think about it: intentionally seeking out somewhere worse than your home and then doing the bare minimum to not die in the process.”

“Humans can’t possibly be the only species that engages in risk-seeking behavior as a pastime. I mean, look at the Doctor—hell, he even likened space travel to camping at one point.”

Jenny made a quiet snort of laughter. “He spends too much time around humans. We’ve probably been a bad influence on him.”

_Such a bad influence that he sometimes turns himself into one._

Harry did his best to banish that observation from his mind. Those thoughts could wait until tomorrow.

_Focus on here, and now, and her._

“Look,” she said, pointing up, “it’s a meteor shower.” 

Above them, through the haze of dust, the sky danced with lights in impossible colours: purple, green, and brilliant yellow.

He could somehow _feel_ her smile of amazement. “This really is an alien world,” she murmured.

In spite of everything Harry had just scolded himself for, he couldn’t help saying it: “It’s our world as well. We came from here, in a way.”

She stiffened. “I don’t want to think about that right now.”

_Focus on here. Focus on now. Focus on the two of you together._

“What do you want to think about instead?” he asked.

Jenny snuggled a little closer. “What it would be like if this weren’t our last night… if things went as we planned… what our lives together would look like.”

He nodded. “That’s a good idea for a bedtime story: _The Tale of Harry and Jenny.”_

“You put your name first, so you should be the one to start.”

“All right…” He took a moment to think about it. “Well, let’s start with the wedding. You swiped a tuxedo from the Doctor’s wardrobe but couldn’t find shoes that fit so you kept on your boots. And I wore… hmm, I hadn’t planned that far ahead.”

“I know this one,” Jenny said. “You wore the outfit from when we went to 1814. The whole works: the cravat, the vest, the tailcoat with the weird shoulder things, and the top hat. That was the best part: the top hat. I actually stole it from you halfway through the ceremony and it looked even better on me.”

“It did not!”

“No, it definitely did,” she insisted, “but we spent years afterwards debating the matter.”

“If you wanted a top hat, you should have gotten your own,” he pretended to grumble.

“That was the present you ended up giving me for our first anniversary. The year after that was a fez—in fact, every anniversary I would get a new hat.”

He laughed. “And what would I get?”

“Hmm… nothing along a particular theme, but it would always be something that you’d thought to yourself at one point _‘oh, I’d quite like that,’_ and then forgot, but somehow I always knew what it was. One year it might be a book you always meant to read, another year it would be a trip to Venice. There would be no way of predicting it, but I’d always get it right.”

For a moment, he could see it: all of the silly little things that make up an entire life.

_Where do people even go to buy hats?_

_I’m never going to find out, am I?_

_Stop. Focus on her. Focus on this. Focus on how you’re feeling right now._

“Let’s go back to the ceremony for a minute,” he said. “What happened there?”

“Well, we managed to bully the Doctor into officiating—he flashed his psychic paper at the register office and it apparently informed them that he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nardole was supposed to hang onto the rings but he lost them—”

Harry nodded. “It turned out that Missy had stolen them and somehow opened a portal to a dimension where everything was exactly the same, only the haircuts were worse.”

“The Doctor stopped her, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” he agreed.

“And then the rest of the ceremony went off without a hitch.”

The wind outside the TARDIS shields picked up, and finally the clouds of dust grew too thick to see the sky.

He rolled over to face her. “Had you figured out what to say, incidentally?”

“Vows, you mean?”

“Yes.”

She looked a little cagey. “Well… I had some ideas, but hadn’t really nailed it down yet.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You were going to just make it up as you went along?”

“It wasn’t as if I was going to _lie,”_ she said indignantly. “I figured I would speak from the heart.”

“The Queen of Citations and you were going to _wing it?”_

“I would have jotted down some notes! What about you? You’re good at impromptu speeches: were you going to prepare anything?” 

“I already did, actually.” And oh, how that ached to say out loud.

Her eyes lit up. “Can I hear them?”

Harry shook his head.

“Come on,” Jenny pleaded, “let me hear them.”

“I can’t,” he confessed.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re all promises that I’ll never be able to keep.”

He heard her breath catch in her throat. They clung to one another in silence.

“Well,” Jenny said after a few minutes, “that’ll be part of the story: whatever promises you made, you kept all of them. And I kept all of mine too.” 

“I can keep one,” he whispered. “I will love you for the rest of my life.”

“I suppose that’s what love is: not an emotion—or not _just_ an emotion. It’s a promise.” She took his hand in hers. “So, Harry Jones: I promise.” She smiled, but he could see the tears in the corners of her eyes. “And I’m going to keep that promise.”

Their lips met, and for a while he couldn’t think of anything but her, and them, and _right now._

_The Doctor said that they were going to remember this._

_They damn well better._

“So, what else happened to us?” Jenny asked him when they were curled up together once more.

“It’s your turn to tell it. Did we stay in Leeds?”

“For a few years at least. Then I figured we’d move on and revolutionise another couple of academic fields. I can only muck about with the possibility of eternal youth for so long before it gets boring. I was thinking I’d try economics next.”

“Keep your sticky fingers off of my subject matter,” he protested. “Go throw astrophysics into disarray instead. They’re long overdue for it anyway.”

“Fine, fine,” she grumbled. “Keep that Nobel you’re probably going to get one day all to yourself.”

“If they let me make a speech, I promise to say only lovely things about you.”

Jenny laughed. “Liar.”

“Like I said: only lovely things.”

She elbowed him in the ribs, which quickly turned into a tickling match, which quickly turned into something else even more distracting.

“Time for more of the story,” Jenny said afterwards. “What else did we do together?”

“Hmm…” Harry murmured as he thought it over. “We did talk about children back when we had that scare a month or so ago. What do you think? Still interested?”

“I think so. How about you?”

“Of course—I mean, have you _seen_ us?” He smirked. “Our children would be gorgeous.”

“Insufferable little geniuses,” she added.

“Even better. How many of these menaces would you be up for setting loose on the world?”

“Two, tops. At least in _that_ way—if we wanted any more than that, you’ll have to figure out another way to procure them.”

“I’d steal them from their prams while their parents were distracted in Marks & Spencer.”

“You had better be quick on your feet.”

He made a tiny offended noise. “I’m _very_ quick on my feet. You’ve seen me run for my life before.”

“I also know that I can outrun you.”

“Well, then _you_ do the kidnapping!” He continued to pretend to sulk. “I’m not about to leave you in the lurch by going to prison.”

Jenny scoffed. “Like a prison would be able to hold you for long.”

“You’ve got a point. All right, your turn again: what happened next?”

She rested her head on his chest. “We saved the world every so often. Nothing too flashy or public, but we were definitely on UNIT’s speed-dial when things got too difficult for them to manage. Any extraterrestrial threats quickly learned to steer clear, because as long as we were around, the Earth was defended.”

“The kids got in on it too, eventually.”

“Oh, of course,” she agreed. “It was basically our family business: saving the world.” She took his hand and threaded their fingers together. “And we were brave and brilliant and clever, and our hearts were so full of one another that there wasn’t any room left to be sad, and even though ‘happily ever after’ doesn’t exist, we got really _really_ close.”

“For as close to forever as we could get,” he whispered. “That was a good story.”

“I thought so.”

Harry almost replied with a terrible thought: _We were a good story too._

But tonight wasn’t the time for that. He could mourn tomorrow.

Right now, they were more real than anything else in the universe.

They wrapped their arms around one another and drew as close together as they could, each one trying not to think the words _‘our last chance.’_

Tomorrow, the nightmare would begin. But tonight was reserved for dreaming.

_Listen, whoever-you-are inside that watch: you’d better remember this night. You’d better remember feeling this way. You’d better remember all of it, you bastard, because I’m not going down without a fight._

* * *

When the morning came, Jenny was tempted to leave the blankets outside the TARDIS out of spite.

She decided against it: there was no point to being unkind in her final hours.

_Minutes._

_Final minutes._

Because that was the reality of the situation: they couldn’t delay forever. They had wrung every last moment out of the previous night, and it was time to say goodbye.

What else was there to say? 

_‘I love you.’_ Neither of them doubted that.

 _‘I hate that it’s ending.’_ Unnecessary.

 _‘I wish we had more time.’_ But they didn’t, so those words would only bring pain.

If Jenny hadn’t told Harry something by now, then it probably wasn’t worth saying. And everything else, he already knew.

There was nothing left to say but ‘goodbye.’

All the same, there was still a tiny part of her that wondered if someone—herself, Harry, the Doctor, or even Missy—would come up with a solution at the very last minute.

_They wouldn’t, though—the Doctor and Missy. They’d rather see themselves come back than go to any great lengths to prevent it._

_I suppose I can’t blame them for being a little biased._

When Jenny and Harry went back inside the TARDIS, the two Time Lords were waiting for them in silence. The Doctor looked exhausted. Jenny couldn’t interpret Missy’s expression at all.

“For pity’s sake,” an irritated Harry said, dropping the quilts onto the floor, “we’re not about to explode.”

The Doctor flinched ever so slightly. “Are you ready?” he asked hesitantly.

Jenny decided to answer honestly. “No,” she admitted, “but it’s time.” She looked over at the console. “The coordinates are set for Bristol, right?”

“Yes.”

“And all that needs to happen is to pull the final lever?”

The Doctor nodded.

“Then let us do it. I think we’ve earned the right.”

_Plus, it’ll be one less thing on your conscience._

Missy arched an eyebrow and Harry glared at her in response. “We’re not going to try anything funny,” he told her. “We just want to go out on our own terms.”

Jenny followed him to the TARDIS controls and, just like they did on that trip from Bristol to Leeds, they both put their hands on the lever.

“Right,” she said, not even bothering to hide her tears. “This is it.”

His eyes were filling with tears as well. “The rest of our lives,” he replied.

She tried to smile. “Any last words?” She desperately hoped that he had some, because it felt like her mind had gone completely blank.

“No matter what happens next,” Harry said, “they’re going to have to remember all of this. He’s going to have to remember that period of time when he wasn’t hurting anyone, when he wasn’t tearing anything down, when he was actually happy—”

“I can hear you, you know,” Missy interrupted, annoyed.

“I suppose you’ll have to remember this twice, then,” he shot back. Turning to look at Jenny once again, he laughed quietly.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You’ve got that look on your face. The one where you’ve had a thought but your mouth hasn’t realised it yet.”

She was about to protest, to say that he was wrong and ask if it was _really_ necessary for them to have one last argument… but he turned out to be correct.

For some reason, Jenny recalled the papers she had written on structural integrity: all of the calculations she made to determine how much pressure something could endure before breaking.

_Is this the thing that finally breaks me?_

Her eyes widened.

_No. It hasn’t broken me at all._

_It hasn’t broken either of us. In fact… it made us stronger. It made us_ _more_ _._

“I know we keep talking about this like we’re going to die,” she said, “but I don’t think that’s true.”

“What do you mean?” Harry’s expression was confused, but an ember of hope began to glow in his eyes.

She felt herself smile—a genuine one this time. “What is anyone except a bunch of memories? That’s what _they_ are, and that’s what _we_ are. So if they remember us, then we’re not really gone.”

It didn’t mean that they were ever going to come back, not the way that they were now, but it was at least _something._ She wasn’t about to be annihilated and, more importantly, neither was he.

“I’ll miss you,” Jenny whispered, putting her free hand onto his cheek. “Even if she doesn’t know it, I’ll be there in her memories, missing you. Loving you. Knowing that you’re in there somewhere too.”

“They’ll probably be a bit cross about it… us not fading away like we were supposed to.”

“They should have expected that,” she noted. “I mean, when did either of us ever listen to a single thing the Doctor told us to do?”

_Oh. Right._

Jenny glanced at the Doctor and Missy. “Thank you,” she said. “I know this wasn’t the way that any of us wanted it to turn out, but I don’t regret travelling with you.”

Harry gave them a half-smile. “Even with all of the ‘nearly-dying’ bits… I had a lot of fun. So, thanks.”

The Doctor nodded but didn’t meet their eyes.

“Well,” Jenny said, returning her gaze to the last face she was ever going to see before everything changed, “here we are.”

Harry brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it. “Say something nice,” he whispered.

“All of the questions I ever asked…” Jenny told him. “You were the answer to every single one of them.”

“We might not have had forever,” he replied, “but I loved every minute of it.”

They pulled the lever down.

Feeling as if she were about to jump into an ocean, Jenny took a deep breath and gave Harry one final kiss.

* * *

One minute, he was in two places, and the next minute, he was in one.

Memories, emotions, the screaming red maw at the fulcrum of his twin furnace hearts—it all returned, burning through his mind and blood like a golden fire.

 _Back._ _Me again._

That utter relief at his return was short-lived, however, as he realised that they were _still kissing._

For a moment, he wanted to hang on and see just how far she would let him take it, but the discomfort was too much for both of them: they recoiled at the same time, blinking away the aftereffects of what now felt a bit like a lucid dream.

The Master and the Doctor stared at one another, eyes wide.

 _(“Your eyes… I couldn’t remember what colour they were…”_ came a voice from out of the haze.)

He wondered what she was hearing.

But rather than talking to _him,_ she addressed her past self. “What happened to Bill Potts?” she demanded.

The Master rolled his eyes. She couldn’t even make it ten seconds without whining about one of her pets.

The other Doctor—Eyebrows—was a bit startled, but responded: “The Pilot took her. It pretended to be that other girl… I tried to warn Bill that it was a trick…” His face twisted in anguish.

To everyone’s surprise, however, the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief. “She’s safe, then. Sooner than expected, but she’s all right.”

“What are you talking about?” Eyebrows snarled. “That creature was—”

“It was still Heather. It’s complicated—even I don’t understand it entirely—but when Bill went with her, she stayed herself. They’re out there somewhere now, travelling together.” She gave her past self a reassuring smile. “She’s all right, I promise.”

“Shame,” the Master couldn’t resist interjecting with a sneer. “Miss Potts missed out on a lovely experience with some early-era Cybermen—”

 _“Don’t you dare say another word!”_ the Doctor spat at him. “Your behaviour there… I still can’t believe that you had been hiding there all along.”

His snide reply about how she never noticed him hiding _anywhere_ didn’t make it from his brain to his mouth, because the sight of her eyes blazing with anger tripped a whole series of emotional switches in his head: confusion, indignance, hurt, and—worst of all—the desperate need for her to _not look at him like that._

His thoughts stumbled so badly that he actually came very close to _apologising_ to her. 

“You changed the timeline,” Eyebrows said, horrified. _“Our_ timeline.”

The Doctor turned her attention back to him. “Our arrival here… it did change things, but it shouldn’t have changed anything that happened with Bill.” She took a sharp breath and spun again to face the Master. “Did _you—”_

“No,” he said, annoyed. “I never touched your precious pet this time around. Spending all those years around her as Razor was more than enough for one lifetime.”

Missy raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t say a word. 

_Clever girl. Just keep your ears open._

He was briefly tempted to warn her about her demise at the hands of that blond prick, but decided against it. Who knows if it would even happen that way now?

“Then how—” the Doctor began to ask, but then gave another gasp. “It was me,” she whispered.

The Master couldn’t help it: he laughed.

“What did you do?” Eyebrows looked just as broken up about it.

“I went to a pub one night and she was sitting nearby. I saw her staring at Heather and I didn’t even think—I just said ‘do you know her?’ and when Bill said ‘no,’ I remarked that there was an easy way to fix that. And then Harry—” She flinched.

The Master flinched as well.

“And then I started arguing with someone,” she continued, her voice studiously neutral, “which must have been enough to chase Bill out of her chair and across the bar to introduce herself to Heather.”

Eyebrows sighed sadly. “So when Heather asked her to come with her…”

The Doctor nodded. “They were closer than they had been in my timeline,” she confirmed.

“How different were things after that?” he asked.

“Not all that different,” she reassured him. “You still went to that colony and negotiated with the Vardies, still went to the Frost Fair and stopped Sutcliffe, still went blind at Chasm Forge… oh, though there was a bit of a difference after that,” she noted. “Bill asked the Monks to give you back your sight so you could contain that bacteria—and a _very_ weird six months ensued before she set everything right.”

“So was I just rotting away in the Vault that whole time?” Missy asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Yes,” the Master replied before either Doctor could speak up. “Nearly pulled your own hair out from boredom.”

“And after that,” the Doctor continued, “well… I don’t know. Maybe none of those other things will happen. I don’t know what effect that’s going to have. All we can do is wait and see.”

It was Missy, not Eyebrows, who responded first: “We’re going to regenerate into the two of you soon, aren’t we?”

To his amusement, the Master noticed that the Doctor couldn’t hide that guilty look in her eyes as she tried to act innocent. “Why do you think that?” she asked.

“Because recalling the details of a previous regeneration is tricky… and you both seem to remember these events in far too much detail,” Missy explained. “Which makes me think that we only had a handful of little pet adventures before it all went to hell and we tried to murder one another.”

“But you’re getting along so well!” the Master replied, pretending to be shocked. “However could you _do_ such a horrid thing?”

“I could ask you the same question,” she said icily.

_Ooo, that stung a bit._

“Spoilers,” he scolded his past self. “Your theory was correct, though: I had already destroyed Gallifrey when the Cybermen showed up. Not sure how they turned everything to dust after I locked them in the pocket dimension, though. Damn tin cans got in the last word after all.” He shrugged. “Oh well.”

He was tempted to just spill all the gory details that he had planned to tell the Doctor on Gallifrey: everything about the Timeless Child and the lies and how much he wanted to rip out the pieces of her that lived inside of him—and then watch not one, but _two_ Doctors fall apart before his eyes.

The revelation would probably tear all of their timelines to ribbons. He and this Doctor would cease to exist a hundred times over.

If he was being honest with himself (for once in his life), he would have been okay with that.

But the thing that held him back, the thing that delayed him just long enough for the Doctor to intervene, was the return of that damned voice from the haze:

 _“Why do_ _you_ _get to be here while_ _I’m_ _doomed to vanish?”_

He supposed that was the question: if he was so miserable, if all he wanted was for it to be over with… then why didn’t he just give that silly fool what he wanted and—

The Doctor interrupted his dangerous train of thought. “This is between you and me,” she told him. “It’s time that we left.”

For a single moment, all he could do was stare into her eyes again.

_(“I couldn’t remember what colour they were—”)_

_(“—when it comes to you, it’s like I’m feeling every possible emotion all at once—”)_

_(“—you’d better remember this night, you’d better remember feeling this way—”)_

“My TARDIS is here in Bristol,” the Master said. “Probably better if I took you back to yours, Doctor—I don’t think old Eyebrows here is ready to see all that.”

“Fine,” she said coldly. “Remember: once you drop me off, that’s it. The game is over. We’re done.”

He nodded but could feel a slight shakiness in the next breath he took.

Was he trembling because it was about to end?

_(“You’d better remember all of it, you bastard, because I’m not going down without a fight.”)_

Or was he trembling because it might not be ending at all?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, well, well... so THAT happened.
> 
> I was absolutely floored by the reaction that the last chapter got: I love that there are people who are just as emotionally invested in these two Disaster Nerds as I am. 
> 
> And OH MY GOD @the-patrex on Tumblr did some fanart of Jenny and Harry GO LOOOOOK: https://the-patrex.tumblr.com/post/615233436268085248/not-gonna-lie-been-thinking-a-lot-abt-the-fanfic  
> No one has ever made visual art of my stuff before! I am SO AMAZED and it's SO GOOD!
> 
> The final chapter will be up tomorrow (4/15), plus a bonus chapter of all the great Q&As that have been going on in the comments (Keep them coming!)
> 
> Once this story is over, I'm admittedly not sure where to go from here (other than back to working on my other in-progress fics). I miss these two weirdos and have a few Ideas that I'll get into after I post the final chapter, but for now it's all a bit unclear. (Side note: if folks want to take these characters and do their own Thing with them, go for it!)
> 
> Stay safe, fam! <3


	9. The Aftermath

The next time he went to the vault, the Doctor could hear piano music from inside.

He couldn’t make out the tune, but it was something slow, bluesy, and a little melancholy.

The Doctor reached out to open the door and paused as he saw a familiar item: his guitar, resting against the wall, with a tiny piece of paper slipped over the E string, under the A string, and back over the D string. 

He opened it and read the note in Nardole’s precise handwriting: _“Her latest demand.”_

He couldn’t help chuckling quietly to himself.

They hadn’t spoken to one another since they got back from dropping the group of humans off in 2020—the three from that time period were somehow even more disoriented by the whole thing than the ones who spent the last who-knows-how-long fleeing a Cyber-army thousands of years in the future.

Fortunately, the three companions at least had a basic understanding of regeneration and knew that their version of the Doctor had previously been male, so at least he didn’t have to waste time explaining that to them.

“But won’t that mean that you’ll recognise us when you show up in Sh—” the young man named Ryan asked before the Doctor interrupted him.

“Better that I not know,” he told them. “In fact, the less I know, the better.”

Meanwhile, Missy had perched herself on one of the railings in the TARDIS control room and smiled like she was trying to decide which of them to eat first.

Yaz, the girl who spoke next, was practically glowing with worry. “Is the Doctor all right, though?” 

“Yes,” he said stiffly. “She just got mixed up in something and wanted to make sure you lot got home safely. Or got somewhere safely, in the rest of your cases,” he added with a nod towards the ones from the future. “She’ll probably be back to fetch you soon.”

“Probably?” The older man—Graham—crossed his arms over his chest. “What do you mean by that, Doc?”

“I mean that I don’t necessarily know what’s going on in that head of hers, but if I were in her shoes, that’s what I would do,” the Doctor replied testily.

“The last we saw of her, that Master bloke made her go with him through a portal to her homeworld,” Ryan objected. “If they—”

“Not to worry, dearies,” Missy piped up, “she’s not worth the trouble of keeping captive. Either she already escaped or the two of them have moved on to other things.”

Ryan squinted in confusion. “What ‘other things’?”

“And who are you anyway?” Yaz asked.

“Me?” Missy replied with mock-astonishment. “Oh, no one special. Just the Doctor’s little houseguest at St. Luke’s University, if you ever felt like popping round for a visit—”

The Doctor shushed Missy with a finger. “Not another word,” he ordered her. He turned back to the others. “We’ve arrived. Sheffield’s outside, time for you to be on your way.”

After a round of awkward goodbyes, the humans departed.

“You shouldn’t have told them where we lived,” he hissed at her while he put in the coordinates for 2017. “Why did you feel the need to do that?”

He heard Missy mumble from behind her closed mouth—apparently she had decided to take his order to stop talking very literally. “Stop that,” he sighed.

She pretended to unzip her lips. “You said ‘not another word.’”

He glared at her.

She sniffed. “I thought that you’d prefer a little company now that your former pets are gone.”

“Not gone,” the Doctor said bitterly. “They were never real to begin with.”

“Don’t try that flimsy justification with me: you liked those two and now you hate yourself for being the one to kill them.”

“If you hadn’t found that watch—” he began, trying not to scream at her.

“If I hadn’t found it, the same thing would have happened: you’d have taken them on a trip as a wedding present and then they would have changed back without any warning at all. The outcome would have been exactly the same—or possibly worse.”

The Doctor couldn’t bring himself to reply.

That was the last time they had spoken to one another.

Until the present moment, when he picked up his guitar in one hand and opened the door to the vault with the other.

“I see Nardole passed along my message,” Missy said as he entered.

He finally recognized the song she was playing on the piano. “You’ve seen _Casablanca?”_ he asked.

“Of course I have.” She sounded a little indignant. “Frankly, I’m surprised that _you_ have.” She fixed him with a glare. “And don’t you dare launch into your typical nonsense about saving Humphrey Bogart from Autons or something.”

He raised an eyebrow in reply. “So,” he said, gesturing to his guitar, “is this a jam session, then?”

“If you’re up for it,” she said airily, but it was hard not to notice the loneliness underlying her words.

He responded by grabbing a chair and bringing it over so he could sit near the piano.

While he did that, Missy started singing: _“You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh…”_

The Doctor felt the corners of his mouth briefly twitch into the beginnings of a smile.

_“The fundamental things apply as time goes by.”_

“Your voice isn’t half bad,” he noted as he started playing along.

“The acoustics in here could be better,” she replied.

“Didn’t think you were a fan of this sort of music.”

“What sort do you mean?” she asked.

“Sentimental.”

She made a small sound of amusement. “I make an exception for you.”

Before he could ask what she meant, Missy resumed singing.

 _“It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die—_ that really does describe us, don’t you think?”

“Are you serenading me?” he asked.

She snorted. “If I was _‘serenading’_ you, it would be immediately apparent.”

“I don’t know,” the Doctor mused, “this seems pretty obvious to me.” He shifted his focus back to the song. “Isn’t there a bridge at some point?”

Missy sighed impatiently and continued: _“Moonlight and love songs, never out of date… hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate—”_

She faltered at that point, struck a few incorrect keys, and then stopped playing altogether.

The echo of the final note faded and they stared at one another in silence.

“I’m not sure I can keep this up for another nine centuries,” the Doctor admitted quietly.

“Then don’t,” she replied. “Leave the door open, declare the grand experiment a failure, and then hit the road, as it were.”

There was something particularly venomous in the way she said the word ‘failure.’

It brought to mind a question he had been struggling with since they returned to St. Luke’s: “How much like us do you think they were?” he asked. “Jenny and Harry, I mean.”

“I haven’t thought much about it,” she said.

“You’re lying.”

“This isn’t the first time either of us used a Chameleon Arch, you know. How similar were you to any of _them?”_

To his surprise, the Doctor shivered. “I spent so much of that year on the _Valiant_ wondering about Professor Yana… how brilliant and kind he had been, how he had used that brilliance to help those around him… and how quickly I found myself liking him.”

“And then you had to face the daily reality of Psycho PM Harold Saxon,” she said, “and every day you’d wonder how they could have come from the same person.”

“Every day I _grieved,”_ he corrected her. “It was like losing a friend all over again. It was like losing _you_ all over again, back when we were young.”

Missy stared at him for a moment, then continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out. “The last time you used a Chameleon Arch, how similar were you to him?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “The same damned thing happened that time as happened this time, though.”

“You fell in love.”

“How did you know?”

She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Because you’re always doing that. You can’t walk ten paces without tripping over a pair of pretty eyes and deciding that they’re the answer to all the questions that have kept you running all these years. And when you pretend to be a little mayfly of a human it’s even worse because you think you haven’t got a second to spare.”

The Doctor felt a reflexive denial on his lips but it didn’t go any further than that, so instead he shifted in his chair, trying not to appear visibly uncomfortable.

He decided that a good offense was better than a good defense: “It wasn’t just me this time,” he pointed out with a sly grin. “Harry Jones was a rather massive fool for love as well, wasn’t he?”

She met his gaze for a moment, looking surprisingly unsure of herself.

“I don’t think you're a hopeless cause,” he said softly.

“Apparently I’m going to destroy Gallifrey,” she snapped, hastily looking away.

“You’re the most stubborn and contrary person I’ve ever met… do you really expect me to believe that you’re just going to lie down and let the supposed future happen without trying to scratch its eyes out first?” He smiled at her fondly. “I think we all have the potential to change—and if it ends up being motivated by spite in your case…” He laughed. “Well, I’d expect nothing less from you.”

After enough silence had passed that it was obvious that she had no intention of responding, the Doctor indicated his guitar. “Shall we?” he asked.

With a long-suffering sigh, Missy resumed the song.

_“And when two lovers woo, they still say ‘I love you,’ on that you can rely.”_

He even joined in on singing the last line: 

_“The world will always welcome lovers… as time goes by.”_

* * *

“Here we are,” the Master announced. “Earth in some wretched version of its future, and your similarly-wretched TARDIS, as promised.”

“Holding up your end of the bargain,” the Doctor muttered as she headed down the steps of the ‘porch’ of his TARDIS, which was still in the form of a cabin (in fact, she was beginning to wonder if the chameleon circuit had broken). “That’s a new one for you.”

“First time for everything,” he said tightly. “Don’t make me regret it.”

She hadn’t gotten more than a few steps through the tall grass when she paused and turned back to face him. “What was all this _for?”_ she asked. “Dragging me to the Citadel, trying to make a deal with the Cybermen, abandoning the plan because I asked you _nicely,_ and then using the Chameleon Arch on yourself and dropping us both in Bristol? What was the _point?”_

“You’re not the only one who gets to run away from their problems, Doctor.”

“So what was this? A holiday for you? A brief fling for you to laugh over later?”

“I never intended for _that_ to happen,” he snarled, suddenly so defensive that it took the Doctor a moment to understand that he was trying to remind _himself_ of that fact.

That didn’t keep her from scoffing at him. “Well, I didn’t think that you arranged this whole preposterous scenario for the sole purpose of getting me into bed—”

She really shouldn’t have gone there, she realised belatedly, because all it did was bring up memories that she definitely did not want to deal with at the moment.

So, of course, he had to make it worse: “We certainly spent enough time there,” he blurted out.

Which triggered yet another cascade of recollection, this one far more graphic than before, while her cheeks reddened and she frantically tried to separate the memory of attraction from whatever residual attraction she might be feeling at the moment.

_Why does it feel like something’s gone horribly wrong?_

When she hid from the Family of Blood disguised as John Smith, it had only been for a couple of months, and a good bit of it was nothing more than the comforting rhythm of classes and ambling walks, until those last few days, when John looked at the lovely Joan Redfern and fell so very hard.

This time, though… she had been Jenny Smith for over a year, and spent nearly half of it in very intimate circumstances with Harry Jones: the two of them cozy in the strange realm of ‘together,’ the adrenaline of stopping an alien invasion paling in comparison to the sheer _rush_ of waking up next to the same person every day and hoping beyond hope that it would happen again the next day, and the next day, until forever.

_(“Nothing lasts forever.” “Then how about as close to forever as we can get?”)_

With John Smith, she had been able to shed that identity with ease—it had been bittersweet, of course, especially with how much it seemed to have hurt Joan, but running away was something that the Doctor did very well.

Then why was running away from this _so much harder?_

The answer was obvious: because it was the Master. Because so much of their life had been a storm of obsession and anger and bitterness and yearning and a willingness to burn down whole worlds if it would land a single blow on the other’s skin. They were already such a volatile mix of emotions and history, and now under even more pressure from the memories of this other life where they were two people who _succeeded,_ two people who had pulled themselves together just as fiercely as she and the Master had torn themselves apart all those years ago. 

Her head felt like a tornado had laid waste to it, like things were still spinning in the air overhead and tangling together beyond recognition: love and hate, respect and disgust, need and revulsion, tenderness and cruelty, vows and betrayals, affection and viciousness, months and millennia… and all of it centering around someone who, for better or for worse, was the most _alive_ person she had ever known.

They had too much history between them now. She was beginning to forget what parts of it were real.

“Well,” the Doctor finally managed to say, “let’s save ourselves some awkwardness and agree to never speak of this again.” She resumed the walk towards her TARDIS.

“Why not?” he asked. 

She sighed and turned back to face him. “I can’t tell if you’re being serious right now. Do you _really_ want to reminisce about all of that?”

He smirked. “We were reminiscing about all sorts of things when you came across the boundary with me to Gallifrey.” 

“No, _you_ were doing that. _I_ was too busy mourning the loss of my home.”

“That wasn’t your home,” he snapped. “It never was.”

“I didn’t say that I _liked_ it,” she retorted, “but that’s where I grew up—where _we_ grew up, where all that history between us happened—”

“‘The _history_ between us,’” the Master repeated mockingly. “Oh, Doctor, if only you knew.”

“Either say something useful or let me get out of here.” She was getting tired of all the gloating and cryptic statements.

His upper lip curled into a sneer. “I destroyed Gallifrey with fire and chaos… but I could destroy you with words alone.”

“Those were always our most deadly weapons,” she sighed wearily.

“Then take aim, Doctor.” He spread his arms wide as though welcoming an attack. “Mutually assured destruction.”

“You go first. This is your game, after all.”

“Still pretending to be a pacifist, then? You’re just a coward.”

“There’s no point to this.”

As usual, he went from ‘taunting’ to ‘furious’ in the span of a single moment. “Go on! Say it!” he shouted, striding towards her. “Say whatever horrible thing you’ve got hiding behind your teeth. Come on, tell me all the things that you despise about me. Show me your rage and pain, Doctor!”

Maybe it was the obvious scream of agony underneath his rant, or the realisation that he was now only an arm’s length away from her, or the fact that she was _so very tired,_ but the words left her mouth before she could stop them: 

“I miss Harry Jones.”

That brought him up short. “What?”

Now that the Doctor had said it, she no longer saw the point of holding back. “I miss Harry, all right?” she snapped. “I miss Jenny too: I miss being her, I miss feeling _certain_ about something for once in my life, and I _hate_ that they were both far better people than we could ever hope to be!” 

Whatever rage and pain he had demanded before… well, she was now more than willing to let it out: “I hate that you have his face and his voice and his hands, because I miss all of those things so much! I hate that I can’t bear to look at you but I can’t bear to look away either because you’re all that’s left of him!” It was like there was a crushing weight on her chest, and she was beginning to break apart underneath it. “And to watch that face despise me… whatever words you have ready, go ahead. You can’t make me feel any worse than how I feel right now.”

The Master stared at her in silence.

“Well, go on, then!” she shouted. “What’s your _secret weapon?_ What’s so terrible that it’ll destroy me like you claimed?”

His expression was so lost now… his eyes were locked on her face as if the answers were somehow written on her features. 

“Well?” the Doctor demanded.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed furiously. “Don’t you _dare._ ”

“I mean it!” He looked just as upset by his words as she was. “He’s still there inside of me and what he felt is still inside of me too, and I look at you and can’t stop feeling the same way.” His breathing sped up and she could see a wild kind of desperation in his expression. “I love you. It doesn’t have to end now that we’ve changed back. Those things still happened.”

_It got worse. How could it possibly have gotten worse?_

“It wasn’t real,” she said quietly.

“It was for them.” He took another step towards her, close enough that she could feel his breath on her face. “They weren’t just costumes: they were real people. What they felt was real.”

After her previous torrent of words, it was now surprisingly difficult to speak. “But we aren’t them.”

“You said that you missed him. _You,_ not her. _You_ loved him, just like _I_ loved her. Please.” He reached out and brushed a finger along her cheek. “Please.”

“You’re only making it worse,” she protested, but when he kissed her, she couldn’t keep herself from reciprocating and drawing further into his embrace.

_How is it possible to be so happy and so devastated at the same time?_

His hand moved down to grip her by the waist as his mouth trailed kisses down her neck, while his other hand helped her take off her coat, and it all felt so comfortable and _safe_ that she whispered without thinking: “Harry.”

“Jenny,” he gasped, and oh, how wonderful that name sounded in his voice, like the granting of a wish she had made so long ago…

But it wasn’t her name.

“Stop,” the Doctor cried out, backing away. “This is… it’s agony. I can’t lie like this.”

He let her go, but his eyes were still pleading with her. “We both lie all the time.”

“But we couldn’t keep pretending for long.” She picked her coat up from where it had fallen in the grass and put it back on. “We’d know, deep down, and it would tear us apart.”

He was silent for a moment. “We could go back,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“We could do what they suggested: turn ourselves back into them and just… live our lives. Give them the happy ending they thought they deserved.”

It was frighteningly tempting. She remembered being so happy and now all she felt was pain. Things had been simple and now they were so complicated. Some part of her wanted to fall back into his arms and just _forget,_ to take even the tiniest offer of solace before everything fell apart again.

But the Doctor remembered where this all began and shook her head. “Not while there’s a planet of dead Gallifreyans out there. Not until I know why.”

She braced herself for a return to the taunting and cruelty… but it didn’t come.

The Master put his face in his hands, made a soft groan of pain, and then dropped his arms down to his side, looking helpless once more.

“You’re not one of them,” he said at last.

“What are you talking about?”

“The ability to regenerate wasn’t something that the Time Lords evolved or created out of their own innate brilliance… it was something they ripped out of a child’s DNA. A child who had tumbled into this dimension from somewhere else, whose blood became the genesis of Time Lord civilisation.” Something in his expression curdled. “All I am is somehow because of you… and I cannot _bear_ that.”

“You think that _I_ was that child?” she asked incredulously. “You knew me when we were young, why would you—”

His laughter was horribly bleak. “In a way, it’s what we were doing in Bristol. Clever little people, not realising that they were so much older than they knew… or that they had done this over and over again…”

“And you think they wiped my memory of my former life? Forced me to regenerate?”

“Former _lives._ This isn’t a theory, Doctor. I _saw_ it in the Matrix: how many times they killed you, over and over, trying to unlock the secret of your ability, and then countless other times to cover up every little mission they sent you on.”

The Doctor felt herself shaking her head.

_This isn’t real._

“And that’s just what the Matrix was able to show me,” the Master continued. “Huge swaths of it were gone. Unrecoverable, beyond even my brilliance.”

“You’re lying.” What had made her jaw clench like this?

“Why would I lie? Why would I ever try to convince you that you’re somehow even _more_ special than you already think you are?”

“You’re _lying,”_ the Doctor repeated.

She _needed_ to believe that he was lying. It was easier to believe that he was the one who was lying, because the alternative was so much worse: that her life was not her own, that someone other than her worst enemy had lied to her, that all of the parts of her life that didn’t make sense were for a _reason_ but they convinced her that she was imagining things… 

She might never know the reason. She might spend the rest of her life with questions that would never have an answer.

But there was still another question, one that the Master _could_ answer: “Why did you destroy Gallifrey?”

“I told you: I had to make them pay for lying to us.”

She looked at him in disgust. “What _‘us’?_ If you’re telling the truth, everything I’ve ever believed about myself was a lie, but all _you_ had was an awkward DNA test result!”

_Of course he had to find a way to make it all about him._

“And besides,” she added, “it wasn’t some planet-wide conspiracy where everyone knew but you: there were millions of people who had no idea and who died for _nothing!”_

His temper flared, which was actually something of a relief. “I started with the High Council,” he explained, “but then I couldn’t stop. Every single one I killed, I thought ‘oh, there’s a little piece of the Doctor dying as well,’ and so I kept going, thinking that if I did enough then it would equate to killing you.”

“There’s a quicker way, you know: you could have just killed _me.”_

His expression fell and the desperation returned to his eyes. “I can’t. You know that I can’t.”

“That never stopped you from trying before,” she pointed out bitterly.

“Things are different now.”

“How?”

It was like he was collapsing in on himself. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m done. I don’t want to be me anymore. This existence… being the Master… I’m ready to be done with it.” He gave another bleak laugh. “Funny, isn’t it? I spent so much of my life desperate to survive by any means necessary, and now I just want it to stop. I don’t want to have done the things that I’ve done. I don’t want to be the person who killed millions in a fit of pique.” He grabbed her hands. “I don’t want to be alone like this—you were the one person who ever halfway tolerated me and now our only form of communication is elaborate disguises and scheme-thwarting.”

It was only then that she realised they were still wearing their rings.

The Doctor jerked her fingers out of his grasp. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to make murder your primary hobby.”

“Aren’t _you_ tired? Aren’t you sick of having your life upended every few years until you can’t remember what’s important?” His shoulders slumped. “I had hoped that we’d both go out in a fiery inferno or something, each daring the other to blink first until we ran out of second chances. It would have been a relief.” He stared at her again with those terrible desperate eyes. “Somewhere along the line I stopped fantasising about what it would be like to kill you and started fantasising about what it would be like to die with you.”

“You’re sick.”

“I am,” he admitted, without seeming to take offense. “I absolutely am. I won’t argue with that. But the only solace I can take from it is the knowledge that you’re not much healthier than I am. You don’t act like a person who wants to be alive. You haven’t for ages.”

The Doctor felt herself trembling. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Yes, I do,” he countered. “I always have—that’s part of the problem. I know you too well.”

She didn’t want to think about whether or not he was correct.

And hadn’t she experienced enough heartache over whether or not _she_ truly knew _him?_ “You could have changed,” she said. “We got so close in our last regenerations… I really thought that Missy might have…”

“She did.”

The Doctor froze. She hadn’t known that. All she knew was that Missy had gone off with the previous regeneration of the Master and neither of them were seen again.

“She did change,” he repeated. “For a moment. And maybe it would have stuck, but we’ll never know because that blond _prick_ shot her in the back before she could go to your side.”

“You shot _yourself?”_ That was extreme, even for him… and in another set of circumstances would have been hilarious.

The Master had anticipated the obvious joke: “I’m my own worst enemy.” He smiled weakly. “But this whole thing, being Harry, let me see what it would be like if I wasn’t so beaten down by my past. Maybe I could actually change without it all dragging me back into the dark. You told me before we started this that you weren’t going to appeal to my better nature because I didn’t have one… but I think I do. I think it’s him.”

The Doctor couldn’t tell if she agreed with him or not. The ray of hope that accompanied his words was too similar to all the other times she had hoped that her old friend might be better than either of them believed… it was a hope that had never been fulfilled.

Why should she believe in it this time?

Regardless, if he wanted to wipe his own memory, that was his choice. “So go use the Chameleon Arch on yourself,” she said. “You don’t need my permission.”

“But I need you there with me,” the Master pleaded. “I changed because you were there with me—because _she_ was there with _him._ They brought out the best in us.” He reached out and took her hands again. “You said it yourself: they were both far better people than we could ever hope to be. So why not be them again, only this time for keeps?”

“It is not my job to make you into a good person,” she objected, but for some reason couldn’t bring herself to let go of his fingers.

“It was once.”

She shook her head. “Your actions are not my responsibility.”

“I’m not asking you to be my nanny, I’m asking you to come _with_ me… because you need this just as much as I do.”

Her mouth fell open just a little. A thousand protests whirled through her thoughts but she couldn’t give voice to a single one of them. 

So she let him continue. “We’re both far too broken the way we are now,” the Master said sadly. “All we do is tear apart everything we touch. We’re dangerous. We’ve stomped all over our own timeline and who knows what effect that’s going to have? If the Doctor and Missy make different choices then we both might not ever exist. So let’s go out on our own terms. Harry and Jenny were good people… they might get it right, in a way we never could.”

That horrible ray of hope was back, but this time it wasn’t just for him. It was for both of them.

And the temptation that it offered was agonizing.

“You’re asking me to die,” she pointed out, more to herself than to him.

He smiled wryly. “It would admittedly be a nice bonus.”

“You want us to die together.”

“In each other’s arms if we can manage it. Fools for love. I would be okay with that.”

She used the only objection she had left: “It would be a lie.”

“We’ve lied and been lied to so much already. Would one more lie really be that bad?”

The Doctor wanted to say no and argue that the truth was the most important thing, especially after everything that had happened… but that argument would have also been a lie.

Because he _was_ right about something: she was so tired.

“I don't know,” she admitted.

“There’s only one way to find out: together.” He looked down at their joined hands and then back up at her, his eyes and voice both asking the same question: “Will you come with me?”

* * *

_“I can’t. I’m sorry.”_

(“Yes. I will.”)

_She returned to her TARDIS and he returned to his._

(They returned to the Chameleon Arch and got to work.)

_She went back for her friends and resumed her life as a traveller._

(Together, they crafted the perfect life… the perfect love… the perfect escape.)

_Her identity and her past were like shards of broken glass, but when had she ever been limited by what she had been before?_

(In a way, the Master’s revenge was complete: there was no longer any trace of the Time Lords or the Doctor left in the universe. He had killed them all.)

_There was so much of the universe to see, so many moments of beauty and tragedy, so many people in need of help and hope. There was so much for her to do._

(In a way, the Doctor had managed to run further than she ever thought she could go. No one would ever catch her, at least not as the Doctor.)

_And that was something she could promise: when things were at their most dire, there would always be a madman (or madwoman, depending on the day) with a blue box ready to help._

(They did the things they had dreamed of together: got married, had children, saved the Earth more than a few times, were brave and brilliant and clever, and had single hearts that were so much bigger on the inside than the double hearts they used to carry.)

_Perhaps, one day, she and the Master would cross paths again. Perhaps it would be different. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt so much._

(Once, they were Lords of Time, ancient and weary.)

_Perhaps, one day, she would seek out her origins and find out the difference between the truths and the lies._

(Now, they are like children, timeless, with nothing ahead of them but possibility.)

_But the truth that mattered, the truth that couldn’t be taken away from her, was this: she was the Doctor._

(Jenny Smith and Harry Jones. Together forever… or as close to forever as they can get.)

_And being the Doctor was enough._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we are. Thank you so much for coming with me on this very weird journey.
> 
> The next chapter is a collection of some of the great Q&As from the comments.
> 
> Speaking of questions, though, there's one that I want to answer here: Why were there two versions of the ending?
> 
> Well, I have two answers:
> 
> 1\. I think both outcomes were equally likely and equally interesting, and I ended up with ideas for both scenarios: one where the Doctor and the Master go back to being Best Enemies while also dealing with the aftereffects of those memories (which never quite go away), and one where Jenny and Harry try to have that happy ending they wanted while also dealing with elements from their former lives' following them (oh, and saving the world. A lot.)
> 
> 2\. The "game" in the title ultimately wasn't one between the Doctor and the Master, but one between them and Jenny/Harry. The game could have ended with either side winning, so I depicted them both.
> 
> If that sounds too much like "having your cake and eating it too," well, I never claimed to be a sophisticated writer. :)
> 
> What this means, though, is that there's a lot of room for More Stuff That Could Happen. As I mentioned above, I have a few little story ideas for both timelines, but I had a lot of fun answering questions in the comments and so would also be open to taking prompts if people have them. (I would also love to read any stories that other people would have about these two Disaster Nerds). So who knows, there may be a series of The Totally Normal and Definitely Human Adventures of Jenny Smith and Harry Jones eventually.
> 
> Meanwhile, I have other WIPs waiting for me: a Thirteen-as-the-Valeyard which contains a lot of Thoschei Mayhem. I also write Star Wars fic (like… a LOT of Star Wars fic), if people are interested in checking that out as well.
> 
> Once again, thank you all so much for reading. I've been stuck inside for over a month now and this has been a fantastic way to feel connected to other people.
> 
> Stay safe, fam. <3


	10. Bonus: Q&A

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People asked some fantastic questions about Jenny and Harry in the comments, so I'm compiling them here.

##  **Background**

**How long have Jenny and Harry actually been at St. Luke’s?**

They arrived in Bristol right before the 2016/2017 academic year started (so, autumn 2016). The events of this story begin in late-February/early-March of 2017.

**What are their Chameleon Arch-arranged backstories?**

Due to the Doctor using the Chameleon Arch really quickly, she didn’t arrange much of a backstory, to the extent that she didn’t even give herself a specific hometown, just “Yorkshire.” The Master also didn’t give much thought to his, though that was more due to laziness than haste, but he at least bothered to give himself an actual city (Manchester) that he grew up in. No siblings or extended family and fairly distant parents for both of them, all deceased. The only reason why Jenny and Harry haven’t noticed how flimsy their backstories are is because literally no one has asked them.

**How did Jenny and Harry first meet?**

They were both in the library and Jenny kept muttering out loud to herself the whole time. Harry finally got fed up, stole the piles of books she was reading, and checked them out of the library himself. After discovering that they were neighbors, Jenny hacked into Harry’s wifi router and changed the password. It’s been downhill ever since.

**When and how did they realize they were neighbors?**

It took Jenny a little while to figure it out after the library thing. Someone accidentally delivered a package to her mailbox instead of his, and when she took it upstairs to give it to him, he opened the door and she immediately hollered “YOU!!!” and threw the package at his head (fortunately for Harry, it only contained socks), and then stormed back down to her flat. It was only later that she realized she missed her chance to shove her way into his flat and get those books back.

**How are Jenny and Harry paying for their flats?**

In this day and age, money is really just a bunch of numbers in a computer. When setting things up in Bristol before using the Chameleon Arch on himself, the Master fabricated identity documents and bank accounts for both of them, though he put quite a bit more into his account than he did into Jenny’s, because he is petty like that.

**What are they studying?**

They’re both enrolled in a postgraduate program that lets them kind of design their own area of study, which means that they’re often all over the place as far as interests go, but Jenny primarily studies condensed matter physics and Harry primarily studies economics and finance. However, they both write papers in the other’s field out of sheer spite.

**What jobs do they want when they graduate from St. Luke’s?**

In a sense, they both want to do what the Doctor does at St. Luke’s: give the occasional lecture on whatever topic they feel like giving, and then be left alone to pursue their own academic interests. Jenny wouldn’t mind doing a research fellowship for a while after she gets her PhD. However, if you were to ask Harry what he wants to do, he would joke about opening a detective agency.

**Do Jenny and Harry share any other classes, or is it just poor Twelve who’s stuck dealing with having both of them in his class?**

They technically do, but they’re both the kind of annoying students who attend the first lecture, grab the syllabus, never attend any more classes except for exams, and then turn in perfect papers at the end of the term. Twelve’s lectures are the only ones they attend regularly.

**Why do they attend Twelve’s lectures?**

Because he’s the first person they’ve ever encountered who they can say without a doubt is probably smarter than they are (about certain things, at least.) Plus, he changes subjects mid-lecture frequently enough that they don’t get bored.

**Did Twelve hear about Jenny’s and Harry’s very... argumentative natures before they started his class, or was that just a very fun and unpleasant surprise for him to have to find out firsthand?**

Firsthand, unfortunately for him! They attended his lectures during the fall term when they first arrived in Bristol, and their animosity towards one another slowly ramped up over the course of the term until it reached a fever pitch about halfway through. In fact, since the Doctor’s is the only lecture that they attend, he was one of the first members of the faculty to have this horrible experience.

**Did Harry and Jenny ever interact with Bill before she left?**

Bill also attended the Doctor’s lectures so they were casual acquaintances. Jenny talked to her more often, mostly in passing if they ran into one another at a pub or something, but those conversations tended to be brief because Harry would inevitably show up and get Jenny’s full attention while Bill got as far away from them as she could.

**Has Jenny ever felt like Bill was bizarrely familiar to her?**

The first time that Jenny saw Bill, she was hit with a wave of emotion that she couldn’t quite place at the time. It was only later that she recognized it as being a ferocious protectiveness.

**Do either Jenny or Harry get dreams like John Smith did in “Human Nature”?**

They do, but they’re more like nightmares: Jenny dreams of running, of being hunted, and of thousands of eyes staring at her accusingly. She doesn’t know what it is that she’s done, but she knows that whatever it was, it was terrible and the guilt of it is tearing her apart. She dreams that she has forgotten something important, something that would fix everything, but the answers always remain just out of reach.

Harry dreams of fire, of cities falling to rubble, and of grass turning to ash under his feet. In his dreams he is so furious and so scared all at the same time, but he never knows why. For some reason, he hears drums in the distance.

At first, they would both drink massive amounts of caffeine to keep from falling asleep. They never acknowledged to themselves that the nightmares were the reason for it, instead rationalizing it as wanting to stay awake in order to get writing done or to torment one another (since the dreams only started after they came to St. Luke’s). But at some point the dreams started to change: it would start the same as usual, but then it would feel like someone else was there, just as panicked and lost as they were. It wouldn’t feel quite like reaching out a hand, but it was a similar sensation: a connection being formed, the terrible sound of Harry’s drums softening into the murmur of a heartbeat, sitting alone with a familiar stranger in an otherwise-quiet liminal space, with a single word whispered between them:  _ contact. _

* * *

##  **Habits and Routines**

**Where do Harry and Jenny spend most of their days?**

Primarily their flats and on campus. How much time they spend at each varies: if Jenny gets really deep into a topic, she’ll just stay in one place until some external cause makes her leave (the library is closing, she just realized that she hasn’t eaten since breakfast and is super hungry, Harry walks by and says something irritating, etc.). There are also periods where she is trying to figure out a solution to something and wanders aimlessly around the city while she’s thinking it over.

Harry tries to keep to a schedule but isn’t very good at it. He’s also a tiny bit forgetful when he’s working on a problem and so occasionally has to walk back and forth between his flat and St. Luke’s repeatedly because he would get almost all the way there and then remember that he left his phone at home.

**Do either of them work part-time?**

No: partially because they don’t really have time, and partially because the Master set them both up with bank accounts before they arrived in Bristol. Jenny’s is starting to get a little low (because somebody decided to be petty when he was deciding on the amounts), so she’s looking into possible research fellowships for the summer. 

**What do they do during school breaks?**  
They mostly stay at home, though I’m now realizing that there’s a great opportunity for a short story set over winter break (pre-TARDIS trips), where a damn Christmas miracle occurs and they’re actually nice to one another for a change.

**Does Jenny have friends?**

Weirdly, in spite of the Doctor’s tendency towards Befriending Everyone, Jenny’s had a lot of trouble making friends in Bristol. A lot of it has to do with being constantly busy and keeping bizarre hours, but also any time Harry is within a three-meter radius of her everyone else in the vicinity runs for their lives. Basically, Jenny meets someone, engages in some friendly conversation, and then Harry Jones walks by and she immediately engages “HERE ARE TEN CITATIONS THAT PROVE THAT YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE” Mode and by the time she regains her senses the potential friend has vanished. However, there is a tiny squad of people in Bristol who worry about her, mostly folks at the restaurants she frequents and the shops she goes to, and they do their best to check in on her because most of them are honestly concerned that she’s going to a) die of starvation, b) die after her heart explodes from too much caffeine, or c) accidentally fall into the river and drown because she was too distracted to watch where she was going.

**Does Harry have any friends?**

Sadly, no. As implied in Chapter 5, he doesn’t really talk to anyone except for cashiers at the store. He just doesn’t find anyone as interesting as Jenny, even though she drives him up the wall, so he doesn’t bother.

**Who’s succeeding in bothering the other the most in their flat war?**

It’s still a tie, but they both use slightly different tactics: Harry tends to employ a more consistently incessant pattern of annoyances (playing loud music at night, sending deliveries to her flat of things she didn’t order and therefore refuses to pay for, stealing her doormat, etc.) while Jenny tends to lay low for long periods of time before unleashing a more complicated and infuriating plan (putting a wireless speaker under the floorboards of his flat, impersonating him in an online forum to the point that he was unknowingly asked to present at a conference, and plotting with a cashier at the local SPAR to have the shop be conveniently “out” of whatever groceries he’s looking for). Though at this point, they’re both on the verge of being evicted for their antics, so they’ve had to tone it down a little.

Harry  _ definitely  _ dances to “I Can't Decide”... while stomping on the floor of his apartment as hard as he can in the heaviest shoes he owns… at three in the morning. 

Jenny gets her revenge by blasting classic punk rock through her ceiling, though her proudest achievement was the time she climbed up the side of the building to break into his apartment while he was out and hid a wireless speaker under his bed. Harry was startled awake at 4 in the morning by the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” playing at a volume loud enough to stun a moose.

**Did one of them ever get locked out of their flat and had to ask the other for help?**

Except for the time that Jenny changed the locks on Harry’s door (which got them both in trouble with their landlord), they’ve both been very good at guarding their keys. However, at one point Harry came down with the flu and Jenny noticed him still trying to attend lectures. She dragged him back to his flat and forced him to get back in bed while she went to the store to get him acetaminophen, ginger ale, and soup. Harry complained the entire time, Jenny was vocally judgmental about the inside of his flat (he’s a bit of a hoarder...), and she stole his bottle opener and shampoo before she left.

* * *

##  **Hobbies and Interests**

**What are Jenny’s and Harry’s hobbies? Is Harry good at playing the piano? And can Jenny play a guitar?**

Jenny would claim to not have any hobbies, but there was a period of time during the fall term when she accidentally joined the women’s rugby team at the University of Bristol despite not being a student there. Mostly she wanders around and sometimes takes tours of historic landmarks.

Harry would also probably claim to not have hobbies either. He watches a lot of television: primarily costume dramas, but he also has a soft spot for  _ Broadchurch  _ (and NO it's not because one of the main characters happens to look a lot like a certain blonde SHUT UP and NO it's not because one of the detectives looks oddly familiar STOP ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS). He also occasionally blows off steam by playing MMORPGs, but it’s hard to keep up with it given how often Jenny messes with his internet connection.

Neither of them play any instruments (though both have considered it for New Ways To Keep The Other From Falling Asleep purposes), but they would both probably be fairly proficient at it.

**What shows does Jenny like watching?**

Jenny doesn’t watch a lot of television, but she’s a fan of the show  _ Taskmaster _ , though it’s mostly for the fun of trying to come up with better solutions to the challenges than the contestants and also for the fun of being super judgy about it. In the time period that I’m setting this fic in (spring term of 2017), Series 4 just started and she has so many thoughts about the justification that Hugh Dennis used with the mirror in the first episode and how she doesn’t quite agree with him but had no one to rant to about it because she wasn’t talking to Harry at the time.

**What are Jenny’s music preferences?**

Jenny is a fan of classic punk: the Ramones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, etc. (Her favorite band is a Glasgow group called the Dreamboys, but no one’s ever heard of them.) After the events of “Thin Ice,” Jenny ransacked the Doctor’s wardrobe and swiped as many band t-shirts as she could find. Fortunately for her, he hasn’t noticed yet.

**Do they listen to stuff on the radio besides stations playing the music they like, if at all?**

Neither of them really listen to the radio. Jenny will usually have Spotify or something playing in the background when she’s at home. Harry has a very precisely curated series of music playlists for specific circumstances (what he’s working on at the moment, what mood he’s currently in, what mood he wants to be in, where he’s walking at the moment, how recently he’s had an argument with Jenny, etc.). His method of discovering new music is to walk into a shop and pull up Shazam on his phone when he hears something he likes but doesn’t recognize.

**What films do Harry and Jenny like?**

Harry’s love of costume drama television shows also extends to movies. He also enjoys classic films in general (his favorite is  _ Casablanca  _ but he would never admit it out loud.) Jenny doesn’t watch many films but she did really like  _ Frozen. _

**Also do either of them read fiction books for fun, or do they just stick to nonfiction books that they use to one-up each other and also to research?**

Jenny enjoys reading biographies, though she also gets super judgmental about the author’s research for some reason: she’ll get to a certain passage and go “hang on, that’s not what happened” but has no idea why she’s objecting to it. Harry likes reading murder mysteries and also catches himself being really judgmental about the killer’s tactics for some reason.

**How do they keep up with the news, if at all?**

Jenny doesn’t keep up with the news at all and Harry is fairly horrified with her for this. Harry has a few news sites that he checks regularly (usually while walking from his flat to campus) and is the sort of person who turns up in the comments section of an article to go “Actually…” and then ramble on for 500 words about something ridiculously pedantic.

**What is Harry’s normal wardrobe like?**

He tends to wear a lot of solid color button-up shirts with the sleeves rolled up and usually has a vest on over it. The vests range from solid black to Sixth Doctor-levels of loud patterns. If asked, Jenny would swear that he gets those vests specifically to give her a headache. His socks are similarly chaotic in design. The rest is just standard slacks and black Oxford shoes. When it’s chilly out, he wears a very nice wool peacoat. He tends to keep clean-shaven but occasionally forgets when he’s too busy with writing.

**Where is Thirteen’s coat?**

It's in the Master’s TARDIS. Her pockets are bigger on the inside and he didn’t want to go to the trouble of emptying them out. Plus, he didn’t want her to have a Nice Coat because he’s extremely petty. However, he left his usual attire in his TARDIS as well, having had a rare moment of clarity that perhaps purple plaid would make him stand out just a little bit.

**John Smith thought his fobwatch was something that had been in his family for generations, or something like that. Does Jenny think something similarly about her necklace? Does Harry think similarly about his wristwatch?**

Jenny doesn’t think about her necklace  _ at all, _ even when it’s actively inconveniencing her (like in Chapter 2 when she got the stethoscope caught on the chain and nearly strangled herself with it), unless someone specifically points it out. If anyone asked her about it directly, she would just shrug and say that she liked it, but nothing more than that. 

Harry, meanwhile, is _very_ aware of his watch and is obnoxiously proud of it. In his opinion, it is the Best Watch Ever and a sign of his amazing fashion sense, in spite of the fact that to literally everyone else it is the most Extra watch that has ever existed... and if it just so happens to irritate Jenny, then that’s a nice bonus.

**How are their rooms furnished?**

They are both EPIC slobs but in different ways. Jenny’s flat is a very carefully curated series of Piles of Stuff where she knows the exact location of every item; however, if a single thing is out of place, the whole system collapses and she has to ransack the entire place from top to bottom before it settles back down into some esoteric definition of “order.” There is no flat surface that isn’t covered in some combination of papers, books, tools, shiny rocks, takeaway cartons, mugs (she makes what could technically be termed “iced tea” in that she makes herself a cup of tea and only remembers it after it’s gone cold), articles of clothing, and more books. She made some attempt at decorating by putting up some posters (a Clash poster, a print of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” a map of the London Underground, etc.), but most of the available wall space is covered in post-it notes and scraps of paper taped to the walls. There is barely enough room on her bed for her to sleep because it’s covered in laundry, several bags, books, and her laptop. Her bookshelves are made of other, less interesting books. 

Harry’s flat, meanwhile, is a genuine health hazard. Much like the current incarnation of the Master, he’s a hoarder who never throws anything away. There are dirty dishes and empty cartons and trash basically everywhere, sectioned off by tiny paths for him to walk through. He hasn’t opened his fridge in weeks and at this point he’s pretty sure that he’ll need to conduct an exorcism in order to do so. Rather than do any laundry, he just orders new clothes online. The only furnishings he’s bothered to acquire are heavy blackout curtains, a desk with a chair, and what could only very generously be called a “bed.” He is a MESS. Jenny stealing stuff from his apartment is the closest thing he’s experienced to taking out the trash.

**Are either of them decent cooks, or do they just get takeout all the time? And what are their favorite takeout places?**

Harry’s “cooking” is making things from a box or can: mostly instant noodles or frozen meals. He drinks the worst instant coffee money can buy: the cheap freeze-dried crystals, which he barely dilutes with water. It’s actually so bad that the cashiers at SPAR beg him not to buy it. When he gets takeout, it’s usually burritos from the restaurant he mentions in the beginning of Chapter 4.

Jenny gets too distracted by what she’s working on to remember to eat sometimes, so often she’ll get super hungry in the middle of the night and will wander over to the one kebab place in Bristol that is open all night. She worked out a system with them where she drops off £40 on Mondays and then gets whatever she wants for the rest of the week when she drops in. Due to the aforementioned forgetting-to-eat tendency, the restaurant usually comes out ahead, though the owner of the restaurant worries about her and tends to throw in a lot of extra chips and sometimes has someone deliver a bag of doner kebab to Jenny’s flat if she hasn’t been by in awhile. She consumes a lot of energy drinks. At one point in time, she got it into her head that she would try out an Instant Pot but decided to make one from scratch. The resulting appliance worked reasonably well though had a few quirks, including soft-boiling any eggs within a three-meter radius and occasionally running without having to be plugged in. She used it about five times and then forgot about it, so it’s now gathering dust on her kitchen counter.

**What are their favorite foods?**

Jenny’s tastes change almost by the day, but it’s mostly carbs. Anything that has too much sugar, too much salt, too much fat, too much spice, too much anything is usually something she’ll enjoy. Harry, despite eating packaged meals almost constantly, considers himself a little bit of a foodie, but his definition of that is “eats sushi on occasion.”

**What are Jenny and Harry’s sexual/romantic orientations? Is their gender identity anything other than cis woman (Jenny)/cis man (Harry)?**

Neither of them really gives much thought to either of those things, though if asked Jenny would just shrug over the gender thing and make some vague statement about how she likes everyone. Harry would launch into a ten minute long monologue about what the exact definition of gender even is and make some vague statement about how he doesn’t like anyone.

I, on the other hand, would say that they both fall under the category of “Bi, But Busy” for orientation, demigirl for Jenny, and cis male for Harry.

* * *

##  **Travelling in the TARDIS**

**What were Jenny and Harry wearing in “Thin Ice”?**

I envisioned Jenny in period-appropriate women’s clothes from the waist up, just with trousers instead of a skirt. She is also probably wearing a Very Fine Hat as well, which Harry would have made her put on a) so that it would hide her terrible attempt at an updo and b) so that she would stop trying to steal his hat.

Harry, incidentally, is basically wearing the exact same clothes that the Master wore in 1834 during “Spyfall Part 2” because good lord Sacha Dhawan looked amazing in that outfit.

**Did the discovery of the Doctor and the TARDIS make them change their daily lifestyles?**

Not as much as you’d think, since they’ve only taken a few trips with him, but it has made them a little more cordial towards one another. They toned down the middle-of-the-night pranks and so are a little more well-rested than before. Sometimes they walked to classes together and even had lunch together once... at least until Harry put his foot in his mouth shortly before Chapter 5.

**Has anyone suggested to Jenny and/or Harry that their animosity might be a sign of them being in love? If so, what was their reaction?**

The general opinion of the student body at St. Luke’s is that they are either on the verge of getting together or have possibly been hooking up this whole time. An example of this happened in Chapter 2: Harry mentioned to Jenny that “they think we’re sleeping together” and Jenny's response was “The only time I’m going to wrap anything around you is my hands around your throat.”

**Do they usually address people by last names or was that just something they did for each other until recently?**

They only did that with one another, and it was due to the circumstances of how they met: when Jenny realized that The Jerk Who Stole Her Books From The Library lived in her building, she didn’t know his name other than what she saw on the mailbox: “H. Jones.” Annoyed, Harry started calling her by her last name, and eventually everyone else at St. Luke’s started calling them that too. They refer to everyone else by their first names, and finally started calling each other by their first names as their relationship improved. I tried to be pretty deliberate in the earlier chapters about what moments they called one another Jenny and Harry as opposed to Smith and Jones.

* * *

##  **Life in Leeds**

**How did Twelve stay in touch with Jenny and Harry? How did that go?**

A few days after the whole thing with the Monks and the bacteria, Twelve started repeatedly calling them on a weekly basis demanding to know if they were back in Bristol and would then hang up once they said that they were still in Leeds. The frequency of those calls decreased over time. It was very sad and also slightly bewildering for Jenny and Harry since he could have just taken the TARDIS up to visit, but by that point Twelve was in Full Sulk Mode and wasn’t going to budge.

**What was a typical day for them like in Leeds?**

Jenny has something approaching an actual schedule now, since she typically has to go to the lab during specific hours, so she’s not quite as much of a night owl as she used to be. To ensure that they actually spend some time together, Harry now keeps to a similar schedule, usually walking with Jenny to campus and then holing up in a library or cafe somewhere and working on his book thesis until she’s done for the day. For the first month or so in Leeds, he would deliberately try to hide somewhere on campus and make Jenny have to track him down, though over time she got better at finding him (and they were also nearly banned from the University library after getting caught making out in the medieval literature section after Jenny spent  _ two hours _ hunting him down). Sometimes they would head straight home, but often they would get sidetracked by something and end up on either the wrong side of town or arguing over semantics at a pub right before last call. Eventually they would make it back to their flat, and collapse into bed, and start the whole thing over the next morning. On weekends, they usually stayed in and got writing done, often punctuated by slap fights over who got to pick the music.

They’re both trying really hard to shed their former gremlin-y habits, mostly through sheer determination to not be The Messy One of the relationship. Harry at one point got really into the KonMari method and drove Jenny absolutely crazy by his attempts to throw things out, which was particularly infuriating since he hadn’t brought anything with him from Bristol so almost everything in the flat was  _ her stuff. _ She finally snapped at him that everything in the flat “sparks joy” for her and so if he wanted to throw any of it out, he would have to start with her. He then picked her up, looked her over for a moment, and then set her down with the pronouncement that he was going to keep her forever. It was surprisingly cute but embarrassingly saccharine.

**Exactly what is Harry planning on doing in Leeds (other than being in love with Jenny of course)?**

His plan is to finish (aka start) his Master’s thesis, though his main hurdle is that he’s not sure what exactly to write it about. The secondary hurdle is that Jenny is very distracting.

**What is Harry’s thesis/book about?**

It’s something vaguely social sciences/econ based, but I haven’t nailed down the exact topic. It’s probably like Chidi’s manuscript on ethics in  _ The Good Place, _ where it's a 5,000 page nightmare that jumps from topic to topic and is basically unreadable, except that in Harry’s case someone will finally manage to read the entire thing in 20 years’ time and discover that Harry somehow  _ created _ several entirely new academic fields. He is utterly insufferable when he gets awarded a Nobel Prize before Jenny does.

**What were their co-authored papers about?**

In almost all of those cases, they were papers that were originally being written by only one of them, and then they would make the mistake of asking the other one to look over what they’d written so far. The ensuing argument would spill over from spoken words into written words (in one case, with Harry furiously typing up a whole section on the economic implications of cellular regeneration on the global food supply, while Jenny tried to steal his laptop out from under his fingers, because it was  _ her _ paper not his!) and would eventually end with them both realizing that the other one had actually made some good points  _ (damn it!), _ and then incorporating it into their paper and giving them co-author credit. In one instance, though, Harry started writing a paper on psycholinguistics as a joke (he really just wanted an excuse to riff on a bunch of lame puns), which Jenny then added another slew of puns to, and by the end of it they had accidentally created a new model for morphemic salience. They sent it off to an academic journal assuming that it would be instantly rejected and were actually a little unsettled by how many times it’s been cited since then.

**Did they go on any cute dates?**

Yes, but they never had an actual date go as planned: Harry would try to pick a nice restaurant and then halfway through their drink order something in the building next door would explode and they would feel compelled to go investigate. Jenny once made plans for a picnic but she got on the wrong bus and ended up in Harrogate. The closest thing to dates were typically the result of them wandering somewhere that they were Not Supposed To Be (usually by irresponsible use of the sonic screwdriver) and discovering either Crime, Peril, and/or Some Really Neat Abandoned Machinery. And really, they probably had more fun on those adventures than they would have had with dinner and dancing.

**Did Jenny and Harry try at all to make any friends in Leeds? How did that go?**

They tried making friends with the couple who lived in the flat across the hall from them, and it went okay at first... except that those neighbors moved out and a new pair of neighbors moved in and Jenny and Harry didn’t notice that they were  _ entirely different people _ for over a month, and then it became so awkward that Jenny and Harry resolved to just never speak to them again.

**What do Jenny’s new colleagues/their neighbors in Leeds think about them?**

Fortunately, now that they’re not hurling insults at one another (mostly), they’re a little more tolerable to be around. The other people who live in their building (except for the poor folks across the hall) pretty much only interact with them when one of them knocks on the door asking to borrow something weird (four empty soda cans, two aces from a pack of cards, random bits of trash, and a teaspoon), so they’re viewed as Odd, But Harmless.

Jenny’s colleagues at the lab groan when they see Harry coming because they know that there is a 30% chance that he’s going to interfere in what they’re working on, and while it’s nice to occasionally have your cabinet of solvents organized in order of frequency of use, it’s much less nice to have them organized in order of frequency of use of the actual names in academic papers. They finally had to institute a rule that not only was Harry definitely not allowed in the lab, he was not even allowed in the  _ building. _

As in Bristol, there is a squad of Very Concerned Shopkeepers that keep tabs on both of them and hope and pray that they’re not going to die from neglect or stupidity. In particular, the couple that owns a nearby Indian restaurant have taken it upon themselves to unofficially adopt Harry since their own children never call or visit. They are  _ extremely  _ invested in his relationship with Jenny and have given him some very not subtle Hints about how it’s time for Harry to Do the Right Thing and marry her and start having kids immediately. Harry is flat-out terrified of them, much to Jenny’s amusement, and about 10% of the reason why they’re getting married in Bristol is that Harry is very afraid that they might actually start planning a wedding  _ for _ them if they found out.

**Did either of them manage to convince the other to watch the shows they like with them?**

She definitely got Harry to start watching  _ Taskmaster  _ with her, though the presence of both Mel Giedroyc and Noel Fielding in Series 4 nearly re-ignited the GBBO Host Wars that had led to their falling out before the events of Chapter 5. Now they just spend their time speculating on whether Noel Fielding or Joe Lycett is more likely to be an alien.

Harry has yet to admit that he likes  _ Outlander  _ and vows to take that fact to his grave. Unbeknownst to him, however, Jenny is already aware of it but is waiting for a truly glorious moment to spring that knowledge on him.

**Did Jenny ever catch Harry watching** **_Broadchurch_ ** **and notice that there's a character that looks peculiarly like her?**

Oh god, he made her watch it barely 72 hours after moving in with her. Jenny’s not that big of a fan (she thinks Alec Hardy is really annoying, though she likes that nice fellow who plays the Reverend) and the fact that Harry thinks that she looks like the actress who plays Beth Latimer drives her absolutely crazy. Jenny gets back at Harry by teasing him about his resemblance to that guy in  _ The History Boys, _ and he responds by jokingly accusing her of being racist for thinking that all South Asian people look alike.

**How do their latest Time Lord memories manifest?**

Mostly in their hobbies and interests: Jenny recently started taking aikido classes and is enjoying it, though she keeps exasperating the instructor by using moves that are completely bizarre but oddly effective. Meanwhile, Harry is growing out a beard and is on the fence about shaving it into a goatee (Jenny finally convinced him not to).

They both used to have nightmares back when they first came to St. Luke's, but it got better over time and now that they're living together it’s just dreams. The dreams are still odd: Jenny dreams of the night sky flickering with lights in impossible colors, of being in freefall, and of wandering through the TARDIS to find stranger and stranger rooms; Harry dreams of laughter, of flying, and, on one occasion, living at 10 Downing Street.

**In the hypothetical situation where they did get the time, how does IKEA furniture building go in the Smith & Jones household?**

It turns out that sonic screwdrivers and IKEA furniture do not mix. Or, rather, it is Technically Possible to assemble IKEA furniture with a sonic screwdriver, it’s just that the end result will not be the furniture that you set out to make. Harry bought a desk (online for delivery; they have still never physically gone to IKEA) and when Jenny tried to put it together it somehow ended up being solar-powered despite  _ not needing to be powered at all because it is a Desk. _

The only other furniture in the flat are a kitchen table (which has never fulfilled its actual purpose since Jenny just uses it as a desk), a bed, and a few chairs, including one oversized armchair that Jenny and Harry fight over and occasionally just sit on top of one another while trying to read. They have fallen asleep in that position more than once, which hasn’t ended well since they’re both (ostensibly) in their thirties and you really can’t do that anymore without some very uncomfortable neck pain the next morning.

**When Harry lost his shoe in their flat for a week, why didn’t he just buy a new pair?**

He would have, he absolutely would have... except that Jenny suggested it first and Harry by sheer reflex declared that  _ no, _ he was not going to give up like some  _ coward, _ and that he was going to find that damned shoe even if it killed him in the process, and by a certain point Jenny wished that she had hidden it because at least then she could move it somewhere for him to find and end this ridiculousness. She did, however, order him a new pair of shoes and when they arrived he was Appalled because  _ why _ would you think I would put something that looked like THIS on my own feet and then go out in PUBLIC, JENNY, I have standards, damn it!

**Does Harry sometimes use prescription glasses?**

This ended up being a Story that Jenny will never let him live down. I'll let them tell it:

**Jenny:** So, one day Harry gets it into his head that he’s going to add some Brainy Specs to his everyday wardrobe, because he apparently didn’t have enough gaudy accessories in his life.

**Harry:** Because, unlike  _ some  _ people I could name, I actually put some  _ thought  _ into my appearance!

**Jenny:** He put no thought into this whatsoever.

**Harry:** Yes, I did! I—

**Jenny:** No thought at all, and here’s why: he went to Boots late one night and grabbed the most brightly-coloured pair of reading glasses he could find on the rack. Spent ten pounds total, and even had enough spare change left over for a tube of cheap lip balm.

**Harry:** I didn’t hear you complain about the cheapness of the lip balm when I got home and kissed you while wearing it, you know.

**Jenny:** Shush.

**Harry:** _You_ shush! I was—

**Jenny:** At any rate, Harry was rather pleased by his newest accessory until he put them on and realised that reading glasses are  _ prescription, _ and his eyesight was already perfect.

**Harry:** At long last, she admits that something about me is perfect...

**Jenny:** Well, it’s not your ego, that's for certain. Which leads me to the best part: he refused to admit that he had made a mistake. He kept wearing them, every single day, even though they gave him a splitting headache and he kept bumping into things and couldn’t read a thing—

**Harry:** They also made my eyes water. I looked broken-hearted all the time.

**Jenny:** It’s true: we’d go places and people would start consoling him.

**Harry:** I always told them that you were the one to blame.

**Jenny:** But even with all of that agony, he still wouldn’t admit that he was wrong—

**Harry:** Because I’d rather be miserable than lose.

**Jenny:** I finally took pity on him and stomped on them while he was in the shower.

**Harry:** You were just jealous of how good they looked on me.

**Jenny:** They looked atrocious. Trust me.

**Harry:** I’m not going to sit here and be insulted by someone who holds up her trousers with neon braces.

**Jenny:** At least they serve a purpose!

_ (They proceed to bicker until their audience gets irritated enough to leave) _


End file.
